


The Long Road Back to Good

by saltsanford



Series: Miles to Go [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Missing Scene, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Platonic Relationships, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-04-29 21:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 55,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5142290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltsanford/pseuds/saltsanford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Washington knows that change is a fast and unforgiving thing. Until one day, it isn't. He trades his grey armor for blue in the blink of an eye, but the real change takes far longer to settle in his bones. Missing moment from the fight at Sidewinder to rescuing Epsilon. Written for NaNoWriMo 2015. COMPLETE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Midnight

For Agent Washington, change is an instantaneous thing.

It does not creep. It does not crawl. It is not a slow and steady realization- a setting sun, or veins slowly warmed with wine. It is an iron train, slamming into him, with the promise that _things will never been the same again, Wash._ They have _already_ changed. You blinked, and-

It's _hey, I'm David_ to _you have been assigned code name Agent Washington._ It's _come on, Connie_ to _call me CT_. It's _crashing his skateboard through the halls of the Mother of Invention and curly straws and laughing the loudest and the longest_ to _you have been matched with the Artificial Intelligence Program Epsilon_. It's his mind going from ONE to TWO _(don't say good-byes I hate good-byes Allison ALLISON AllisonAllisonAllison he lied he lied he twisted us tortured us we are pieces help us Agent Washington help us helpushelpus)._

Change is cold, and hard, and unforgiving.

So when the Meta picks up the Epsilon unit and cloaks himself and becomes a part of his surroundings-

something inside of Wash clicks, switches, transforms, and he hears himself scream, "Doc, you have to protect Epsilon!" ( _protect him from what, Agent Washington? From Meta? Or from you?_ ) and he's jumping onto the Meta's back and-

Blurry, everything is blurry. There is blood on his gloves and blood in his mouth and when the Pelican crashes in a spectacular shower of snow and sparks, he quashes down the absurd feeling of joy and relief in his gut, tells himself firmly: _they are not here for **you** , they did not come for **you** they came for **Church** they came for their **friend**_ -

But the calvary is here, nonetheless. He can't go back to prison, he won't go back to prison, but there's blood seeping through the torn Kevlar on his ribs and he can't tell if he's been shot or hit by shrapnel or both and he thinks, well, it might not matter after all-

_(I'm sorry, did something about my actions indicate I expect to survive?)_

"I can't. I'm done," he says to Sarge, and he means it in a way that he has never meant it before. He pushes the grappling hook into Sarge's hands. "Here. Take this. You know what to do."

Wash is delirious with blood loss and exhaustion and Christ, he doesn't know what he's _saying_ \- how can he expect these Simulation Troopers to know what to do when he himself has _no fucking idea?_

But he remembers a Warthog smashing through a cliff wall, and a Pelican drifting, diving, dropping into the snow and he thinks, _they are better men than you_. Change is a hard and howling thing, and it is splitting his life apart.

Agent Washington collapses into the snow and raises his bloody hands to the sky, reaching for something to hold- his gun? Where is his gun?

There is no sound for snow falling. There is only the quiet, and the blood rush in his ears, and the way the flakes melt like tears down the slope of his visor.

He lets his palms fall, and the snowflakes wink into stars before turning black.


	2. 1.1: Indigo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left kudos on my little bitty prologue! *blushes* As the summary says, I'm writing this for National November Writing Month, so the goal is for this fic to be at least 50,000 words. I'm bound and determined to make that goal!

When Agent Washington wakes up, it is to the smell of spray paint, of all things.

He climbs his way back to consciousness, one rung at a time, eyes tearing reflexively as they crack open against the cold. The snow dries almost immediately on his eyelashes, freezing them together.

"Nice of you to join us, Agent Washington."

The voice is gruff and exasperated and can only belong to Sarge. After a moment of searching, Wash finds him standing slightly to the left, but before he can answer, another chimes in.

"Oh! Oh! Agent Washington! You are awake! I am almost finished with your present!"

Wash recognizes Caboose's voice even more quickly, so he stops trying to glance around. Things are still spinning, a kaleidoscope of red and blue and white, and trying to force the colors into shapes is doing little more than making him sick. He blinks hard, the icicles on his eyelashes sweeping across his cheeks, and-  
wait.  
_Wait._

It takes him much longer than it should to realize that there is no HUD visor covering his eyes, no reassuring warmth from his helmet. The world is far too bright and his face is far too cold and-

He tries to lift his hands to his face, but only the right one makes it. Doc has a hand wrapped around Wash's bare left wrist, fingers pressed into the pulse point. They grey gauntlet lies forgotten in the snow next to them. Wash thinks that, surely, he must have a more efficient way of checking someone's pulse, he's a medic, for fuck's sake, but this thought is quickly forgotten when Wash's fingers touch, not hard, reassuring armor, but the exposed flesh of his own cheek.

Anger and vulnerability war in his gut. He does not have the right to be angry at them, and he no longer knows how to be vulnerable in front of others, so he gropes for some middle emotion and comes up empty. "My helmet," he mutters instead, and winds up sounding, of all things, _hurt_.

"Calm down, dude." The soldier in the aqua armor- they have never met, but Wash has heard the others say his name many times and knows that this must be Tucker- makes a dramatic motion that includes a roll of his whole head. Not that Wash would even be able to see if he were rolling his eyes, as _everyone else is still wearing their goddamn helmets_. "We had to check if you were alive and all that shit. And we gotta get your armor off like, stat, and you being unconscious was kinda slowing the process down."

Not until he hears the _snaphiss_ of armor releasing do Tucker's words take full meaning in his head. Wash glances down to see Tucker removing his left boot, and realizes that several pieces of his grey armor are already lying on the ground. He jerks in alarm.

"What...." a sharp pain spikes through his ribs, cutting off his words. York's old healing unit is pumping painkillers through his system and doing its best to knit him back together, but he can feel the worst of his injuries through the haze. He twists experimentally and finds a thick patch of biofoam on his left side.

"Hey, no sudden movements," Doc admonishes him. His hand is still wrapped around Wash's wrist. "I think you've been shot. And blown up. And nearly blasted off a cliff. And I'm pretty sure some of your ribs are broken. You gotta take it easy."

"But..." there's another _snaphiss_ as Tucker removes his shinguard. "Wait. What's going on?"

"Oh, it's so great!" Caboose is practically jumping up and down. He's holding a can of yellow spray paint in one hand and what looks like armor in the other, so now Wash knows where they smell of paint is coming from, but not why the hell there's spray paint present in the first place. "You are going to be our new best friend, Agent Washington!"

There's a loud "tch" of dissent, and Wash turns his head- slowly, following Doc's advice, as the world is still blurry- to see Simmons and Grif several yards away. Every line in Simmons' body is screaming MISTRUST. "That's one way to put it."

There's another war going on in Wash's gut, this time between guilt and confusion. The confusion wins, because the scene in front of him is just too bizarre. Grif and Simmons are removing Church's blue armor from his body and stacking it neatly on the ground. It's the first time Wash has seen Church's cybernetic body, and it's good, really good. There's nothing to give it away at first glance from being robotic, except for the still open eyes, startling in just how bright and green they are. He's seen eyes this green before, in another life, but there's something almost electric about Church's. Bright and electric and utterly blank. Wash forces his own eyes away. "What happened to Epsilon?"

"He got his ass stuck in that stupid memory unit," says Tucker, and Wash can't help but notice that he sounds more than a little pissed off about it. "So that's fucking great."

"And...the Meta?"

"At the bottom of that cliff," says Grif and okay, apparently they did know what to do, after all. "Dead as a fucking doornail."

So there it is. Wash tries to muster up some energy for the emotions he should be feeling: despair, at the fact that his only ticket out of this mess is trapped inside a broken memory unit. Anger, at the undisguised glee in Grif's voice. Devastation, over the death of his old friend- but he has never made the mistake of meshing Maine and Meta in his head. They were separate, had always been separate, and he said his good-byes to Maine a long time ago. 

There is no despair, and there is no anger, and there is no devastation. There is only this: a deep quiet in the center of his skull, and the sense of screaming into an open, empty field.

 _You are the only one left, now_.

When it seems that no one is planning to explain things further, Wash says, "I don't understand," and everyone, even Caboose, stops what they're doing and just stares at him.

"You're going to be our new best friend!" Caboose says again.

"Not really an explanation, Caboose," says Tucker, and then to Wash: "We're switching the armor."

Wash tries, really tries, to grasp his words, but they may as well be in another language. He watches as Tucker yanks a grey boot off, tossing it over to Grif. "The armor..."

"Your armor and Church's!" Tucker says impatiently. "We're taking his off so that you can put it on! Now pull your shit together and help me out before I change my vote again! We don't have all fucking day!"

Wash decides that this is a hallucination. Or a dream. Or that he's dead. Whatever. Any one of those options makes far more sense than what Tucker just told him. He opens and closes his eyes several times, and shakes his head back and forth, hard.

"What did I just say about sudden movements?" says Doc, exasperated, and okay, that pain bouncing around the inside of his skull feels way too real to be a hallucination.

"Why?"

"Why, what?" Tucker's got his other shinguard off now.

"Why...are you giving me Epsilon's armor?"

"So that the Feds think you're him!"

"But..."

"Look, they're probably gonna throw your ass back in jail, right?" Grif interrupts.

Wash's stomach ties itself into knots. "Without Epsilon, there's no probably about it."

"Well, they can't throw you in jail if you're dead, can they?"

Wash glances- slowly, _slowly_ \- between Church's unarmored body and the blue plates stacked in the snow next to it. "So...you mean..."

"We mean, you get the temporary joy of being Private Leonard Church." Grif snickers. "Sucks for you, dude."

"But-"

Sarge cuts him off. "Do you wanna go to prison or not?"

"Of course not-"

"Then it looks like nap time's over! Get your kiester up and get in the Blue's armor!"

Wash isn't even close to convinced that this isn't some huge joke, but it's either roll with it or lie here in the snow until the Feds show up to haul his ass off to jail.

He decides to roll with it.

"Alright," he says, "Let's..." after a bit of fumbling, he gets his remaining gauntlet off, dropping it unceremoniously beside him. "Let's do it."

"Yeah, that really sped up the process," Grif says dryly.

"Tucker, help me sit him up," Doc says, and Wash frowns.

"I can sit by myself-" he starts, but a fair amount of flailing proves that this is not the case, and Wash can't stop the sharp exhalation of pain as fire dances across his ribs again.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," groans Tucker, moving around to his side to help Doc ease him to a sitting position.

Wash wants to tell them both not to touch him, but he just closes his eyes to stop the world from spinning as they sit him up. Fuck, Doc wasn't kidding. How did he let himself get so _hurt?_ By the time things steady again, all of the armor is off his arms. He unlatches his codpiece and lets Tucker and Doc lift his chest harness over his head, and then he's left only in his black Kevlar undersuit, shivering in the snow. 

It takes everything Wash has not to yelp or pass out as they hoist him to his feet. They snap Church's armor onto his limbs and he helps where he is able, listening to them bicker and joke around him. He speaks up only when he sees Caboose approaching him with Church's blue shoulder pads- only they're not blue anymore, they're yellow, and now Wash knows what the spray paint was for.

"Now we can tell you apart from the other Church!" says Caboose as he attaches them to Wash's shoulders. 

Wash has many questions- _you know my name isn't Church, right?_ and _why are you giving me your friend's armor_ and _do you really think this will work?_ but what he actually finds himself asking is, "Where did you get yellow spray paint?"

"A good commanding officer always carries around a repair kit!" says Sarge, and Wash glances over to find that the Reds are stuffing Church's body into the grey armor. For all intents and purposes, it looks like Wash himself is lying dead on the ground. 

He can't decide how to feel about it.

"Your repair kit includes spray paint?" he asks instead, his words faltering slightly as the sound of approaching Hornets rumble in the distance.

"Of course it includes spray paint, idiot," says Sarge, and leaves it at that. He drops Church's sniper rifle on the ground next to the grey armored body, examines it critically, then carefully moves the rifle three inches to the left.

"Here." Wash turns to see Tucker holding Church's blue helmet out to him, yellow stripe down the center and all. " _Today_ , dude."

Wash slides the helmet on. He feels marginally better when the HUD lights up. Less so when it calibrates itself to his body and immediately warns him that his condition is critical. "So...what do I have to do?"

"Alright, here's the story. Doc and our good buddy Church-that's you-" Tucker reminds him, "were taken prisoner by the Meta and Agent Washington. The rest of us swooped in like a bunch of goddamn heroes and saved the day." He shrugs. "I mean, that _is_ what happened."

"And Tex?"

"We took her out, too," says Grif breezily. "Like Tucker said. Goddamn heroes."

"And you think...that they're going to buy that?"

Six armored faces turn to glare at him reproachfully. "I didn't mean..."

"They'll buy it as long as you stick to the story, Blue," says Sarge, shoving Wash's battle rifle at him with a bit more force than necessary. Wash takes it and decides to shut the fuck up.

"Am I the only one who thinks that _this is a terrible idea?_ " Simmons bursts out angrily, and frankly, Wash is surprised that this point hasn't come up sooner.

Tucker sighs. "Okay look, I'm not saying I disagree, but we voted on this and-"

"Did you not hear a thing we told you in the desert? He took me prisoner- _he killed Donut!_ "

"I know that, Simmons," Tucker says, but Simmons is already whirling to Doc.

"And you! He took you prisoner, too! Have you all gone crazy?"

Doc shifts uncomfortably. "Look, no one's defending anything Wash did, but..."

"But what?!"

"The war between the Reds and the Blues is a lie," says Sarge, and Wash turns to stare at him.

"I fucking told you that like, a million years ago," says Tucker in exasperation, but Sarge is clearly gearing up for a Speech.

"We were used! Abused! Stuck in some canyon and forgotten about until Freelancer cooked up some training scheme for their Agents! For years, we thought we were fighting in a war both noble and just! Those Freelancers used us as canon fodder, and I can't help but think," Sarge turns to glance dramatically at Wash. "That someone somewhere was using them, too."

"So you're saying that he deserves a _second chance?_ " says Simmons sarcastically.

"I'm saying that this is a Blue Team problem, Simmons! Like everything else we've been dragged into! Can it! You're ruining my speech!"

"Haven't we already been subjected to one of those today?" mutters Grif.

Tucker throws up his hands. "Okay, can we finish this heart to heart later? Somebody hide the yellow spray paint, for fuck's sake, they're coming. Be cool. Act normal."

The quiet roar of the approaching Hornets has grown louder as they argued, and within moments, the UNSC soldiers have descended over the scene. They spread out, congregating at the cliff that the Meta went over, and staring suspiciously at the Reds and Blues, who are doing their best to Be Cool and Act Normal. Wash can't decide whether he should be more concerned about the Feds seeing through this whole charade, or about passing out and blowing said charade. It's taking every ounce of his concentration and willpower to keep his feet. One of the soldiers in grey and green armor approaches them, agitation sketched into the hard lines of his body as he snaps at someone over the radio.

"Yeah...yeah tell Michaels I'm not gonna make happy hour... _yesIknow_ it's 3 credit Cosmos night! It's not my fault! Look, just fucking tell him! Asshole," he mutters, then levels a sullen glare at the Reds and Blues. "Alright. Start talking."

"Are you talking to us or Michaels?" Grif asks, a picture of innocence, and the soldier slowly turns to glare at him.

"We were tracking our teammates here," Tucker interjects, gesturing at Wash and Doc. "Those Freelancers took them hostage-"

"Why?"

"The fuck should I know? They didn't exactly give an _explanation._ "

He eyes them suspiciously. "Why are you working with Red soldiers?"

Sarge is all too happy to continue their story. "Because Agent Washington here took Simmons hostage first! Red Team wouldn't stand for such a thing! We left the desert in a blaze of glory and-"

"And then I got stuck in a wall," Doc says. "So the Meta carried me around in the wall and-"

"And that's when they found Church!" says Caboose brightly.

The soldier is staring at them now. "But-"

Wash closes his eyes as the world gets a little fuzzy, and hopes that no one notices him swaying slightly on his feet. The HUD helpfully reminds him that his ribs are broken. The Reds and Blues carry on with their tale, and Wash has no idea how they're going to bullshit themselves out of this mess. He also has no idea how he's going to keep his feet for another second. It's hard to tell, at this point, what's a gunshot wound, what's a shrapnel wound, and what's just a giant bruise. Wash isn't entirely sure that it matters. 

He tunes back in just as one of the Feds bellows from across the canyon. "Hey Chief! Looks like the Epsilon unit is over here!"

The Chief sighs. "Definitely not making happy hour now...anyway..." he stares at the line-up of them again. "What were you saying?"

"We were _saying_ that we saved the day, dude," says Tucker.

"But..." the Chief glances around. "How did you get here? And where the hell did the Pelican in the water come from?"

"Hmmm...I don't know. I guess the Meta must've hijacked it. And crashed it here. That makes sense, right?"

Wash rolls his eyes inside his helmet, but luckily, their interrogator doesn't inquire further. "Man, the chairman is gonna be _pissed_. The budget only allows for one crashed Pelican per mission. Alright. Well, I guess you guys check out. You can head back to your training bases now."

"We just call them bases," says Sarge, while Wash silently marvels that the fact that this soldier thinks that their half-assed explanation _check out_. He starts to wonder if they're actually going to get away with this. Had this been a Freelancer mission gone wrong, the debriefing would've lasted two days.

"Yeeaaah. I bet."

"Hey, we solved your problem," Grif snaps. "Not bad for _trainees_."

"I gotta hand it to you. Killing one of these guys would be tough. But three? And this guy..." he glances over at Church's grey-armored body, and Wash holds his breath. "The Chairman will _not_ be happy he's dead. I think he wanted to debrief him personally. Oh well."

"Yeeeah," says Tucker. _Cooly._ Playing it cool for all he's worth.

"Yeah. That's too bad," Caboose adds helpfully.

Wash can't resist chiming in, because it looks like he might actually not be going to prison. "Well. Be sure to let him know we're sorry."

"Whatever," says the Chief. "You're free to go. If we need you, we know where to find you."

And he walks off. _He fucking walks off_ , into the goddamn sunset, and it appears that they have gotten away with it, after all.

Later, Wash knows, the Chief will type up a report. He will open the file that says Agent Washington, and check one final box, the one that says KIA, and Agent Washington will exist no more.

It's an oddly freeing thing, he decides. To be dead, without actually dying.

"Why are you guys helping me?" he asks when the Chief and all other soldiers are safely out of earshot.

"You helped us, Wash," Caboose says solemnly. "It only makes sense."

Tucker shrugs and adds, "Yeah. Plus we need to even the teams. And I couldn't put up with Caboose constantly asking, _'can we keep him? Can we keep him?'_ " 

There's a nagging feeling deep in Wash's bones, because it can't be that simple, nothing is that simple, but they've gotten him this far and that's not nothing. "For what it's worth? Thanks."

"Race you there, Bluetards!" Sarge hollers, and the Reds take off.

"Where's there?" Wash asks, or tries to ask, because he can't stop the sway this time, and sits down heavily in the snow.

"Church! Are you alright!"

Washington doesn't think he's ever met anyone who speaks at Caboose's level of volume _all the time_ , but somehow, the Feds have failed to notice both his frantic question and the fact that one of the Blues is trying not to pass out in the middle of an investigation. He _thinks_ they don't notice, anyway. The grey coloring the edges of his vision are making it a little hard to tell.

"He really doesn't look so good, Tucker..."

"Yeah, I know, Doc- aw, man!" Tucker exclaims as a UNSC Hornet rises majestically into the air- a flight made slightly less majestic by the screaming and cursing echoing from it. They watch the plane wobble and dip before righting itself, and the Reds sail away into the sky. "Fuck! Why didn't _we_ think to steal a plane!"


	3. 1.2: Iolite

It's no plane, but the UNSC soldiers _do_ reluctantly lend them a jeep.

"But you have to _return it_ ," the interrogator from earlier says sternly. "If that thing isn't back at Command in one week, you will all seriously regret it. Got it? You have to return it _or else_ -"

"Yeah yeah," says Tucker. "Doc will drive it back to Command, _Jesus._ "

The Chief stomps off, and Wash turns to Doc. "You're coming with us?"

"Well, if I don't," Doc says lowly, "the odds of you bleeding out all over the jeep are pretty high, and then they're gonna be _really_ pissed when we return it."

Wash nods, and half climbs, half collapses into the back of the jeep with Doc as Caboose yells, "Shotgun!" and clambers into the passenger's side.

Tucker surveys them all, mutters, "fucking beautiful," and hoists himself wearily into the driver's seat. The tires spin momentarily in the snow before finding their traction. 

Caboose twists around in his seat, regarding Wash anxiously. "Church! You should use the glowing green thing to fix yourself! The one you used to fix me!"

"Glowing green thing?" Tucker asks, sounding as if he isn't entirely sure he wants to know the answer.

"He means my Freelancer healing unit...I used it to heal Caboose once, when we first met..."

Tucker stares at him in the rearview mirror for a moment before shaking his head. "One of these days, you are gonna give me a full fucking rundown on what I missed while out in that desert."

"Can't wait," mutters Wash, and closes his eyes. He quickly snaps them open again when Doc starts poking at his side. "Ow!"

"This biofoam needs to be changed already," says Doc, not sounding apologetic in the slightest. "Caboose is right, don't you have a healing unit?"

"It's running, but...look, it's a healing unit, not a miracle worker."

"Great," Doc sighs. "Well, let me see if I can-"

"OW!"

"Sorry, it's just, Tucker drives like a _maniac-_ "

"How about," Tucker says from the front seat, "You save playing nurse for when we're actually on stable ground that isn't in the middle of a blizzard? And how about I do my best to get us to said stable ground quickly?"

"It's fine," Wash tells Doc. "By then my healing unit should've dealt with the worst of it."

Doc sighs again, but nods and leans back in his seat. Wash does his best to ignore the side-eyed looks of concern he gets every five seconds.

They lapse into silence. Wash eyes them each in turn and waits patiently for the moment in which they all remember- _really_ remember- that he is the one who shot their friend in cold blood and set off an EMP that obliterated their _other_ friend. Waits for the moment in which they decide that helping the injured ex-Freelancer with list of problems longer than their combined arms is a _bad idea_.

He waits. The moment doesn't come. 

For now.

To distract himself, Wash fiddles with his helmet and tries to turn the various flashing CONDITION CRITICAL warnings off. He succeeds after only a few blinks and taps- Epsilon's HUD is rather similar to his own- and plays around with its various functions. The most obvious difference is the fact that his new HUD registers the heat signatures of Doc, Caboose, and Tucker as friendly. His old helmet certainly didn't do that. Wash briefly wonders how the armor could know he switched sides, before he realizes that of _course_ it reads their signatures as friendly, it's Church's armor, after all. Then again, the health readouts have recalibrated themselves for a human body, not a robotic one, and his screen is prompting him to enter a name. He keys in AGT WSH and gives up trying to make sense of it.

A little envelope pops up on his screen, and Wash feels his heart rate go up- _it didn't work they know it's you the Feds are on their way_ \- before realizing that it's from Caboose and that if the Feds _were_ coming, they certainly wouldn't warn him. He accepts the message as Caboose says brightly, "It's our own private Blue Team talking group! And you are on Blue Team now, so you are in the group!"

"...talking group?"

"Yeah. Like a chat room. Texting. Whatever," says Tucker.

"Why do you need a chat room if you can just talk on the radio?"

"Because you can't send each other funny pictures on the radio." Tucker says this with the air of a man who has seen far too much in his young life, then sighs, resigned. "Oh yeah. You need our radio frequency too, I suppose. It's Foxtrot69. _Bowchickabowwow_."

Wash stares at him. "What the hell was that?"

"It's my _thing_ , dude. Go with it."

Shaking his head, Wash scans through frequency until he finds Foxtrot69 and adds it to his list of primary stations. "Oh, and add Tengo815, too," Tucker continues. "That's our channel with the Reds. You know, for when we're working together and shit. Or pretending to work together. Whatever. You'll probably need both."

Wash adds that one, too. "Do you work together a lot?"

Tucker shrugs. "Eh. Something like that. They're okay. I wasn't lying, you know. I knew the whole 'Red versus Blue 'thing-" he makes little air quotes with one hand, the other still draped across the steering wheel- "was bullshit years ago. Put two and two together after talking to Command. They didn't really go out of their way to hide it. But...I don't think the guys wanted to hear it. Especially not Sarge. It really fucked him up."

Wash wonders, for the first time, how Sarge got dropped into a place like this- how all of them got dropped into a place like this. He feels guilty, before he remembers that he once wondered the same thing about himself, and he thinks that Sarge had a point, maybe, in his speech.

They'd all been used.

Before he can think too hard about what he's doing, he scans through the radio frequencies until he finds SierraNovember99, and keys in the password. The static that blossoms in his ears is soft and steady, and for some reason it angers him. He knew it would be silent, knew that there would be no York clogging up the radio with his chatter, no Carolina barking orders, no grumbling from Maine, no sass from South, and yet...

And yet thinks that the silence on this old frequency shouldn't be quite so silent. It should be loud and furious and piercing; it should blow his eardrums out with its rage.

_They'd all been used._

***

By the time Tucker stops the jeep for gas, the adrenaline that Wash hadn't even realized was coursing through his system during the interrogation has worn off, leaving him woozy. He closes his eyes and wonders how he was shivering only a few hours ago when now he feels warm, so very warm, and he thinks that if he can just take his helmet off and get some air then-

"Wash. Wash. _Agent Washington_."

He starts and blinks over at Doc, who has a hand on his forearm. "Uh. What are you doing? You can't take your helmet off, there are people around."

"Oh," says Wash.

Less than a minute later, Doc is stopping him again. "Wash. Are you okay?"

"Stop doing that," Wash mutters, and he leans forward and drops his head between his knees.

"...Doing what? Stopping you from taking your helmet off and blowing your cover?"

"I dragged you around in a wall."

"....Yeah...I remember that..."

"So stop asking if I'm okay."

"Jesus Christ, what did we miss?" Tucker and Caboose are back, and he hears their footsteps falter in the snow. "Doc. What the fuck's wrong with him?"

"I think he has a fever," says Doc hesitantly. "Or it's shock. Or sleep deprivation. He didn't sleep so well in the desert..."

"Great," Tucker snaps. "Thanks. Really narrows it down. Okay, Washington, just keep your shit together until we get to Valhalla, it's only another hour or so-"

"Are we going to the desert?" asks Wash, lifting his head, and whoa, that may have been a mistake, the colors are all blurring together, _blueblueblue_ , until he can't tell the difference between the blue of the sky and the blue of the armor surrounding him.

"What? No, Valhalla's not in the desert, but it's at least warmer than this fucking place-"

"Good," says Wash, "It's too hot in the desert."

His body goes loose and limbless, and he hears the crash of armor on armor as he sways heavily out of the jeep, hears the enthusiastic cursing from Tucker and the concerned cries of Caboose-

but the blue is now black and he sees nothing, and soon the sounds go soft and steady like static in his ears.

***

"Look, he's fine, alright?"

_He is not fine but he has to get up he has to get up._

"He doesn't look fine to me, buddy."

"We ran into a bit of a situation with some Freelancers back on Sidewinder, fucking call the UNSC headquarters or whatever if you don't believe me!"

"He looks like he needs medical attention..."

_Agent Washington. On your feet._

"Yeah, we're on top of it, genius. We got a medic here, see?"

"Your medic looks about as useful as a blunt knife."

_Get up. Assess the situation. You have to move._

"How the fuck would you know? You're a fucking gas station attendant. I'm telling you, he just got knocked around a bit, we all did."

_We've all been used we've all been used._

***

Swaying, his body is swaying like the sea. He tries to open his eyes but they're hot and heavy, no icicles on his eyelashes now, and he can only peer through the cracks. Caboose and Doc are on either side of him, and they've each got one of Wash's arms slung around their shoulders. He stares at his stumbling feet, tries to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

"We're almost home, Agent Washington."

Caboose's voice filters into his head slowly. _Home?_ he asks out loud, or maybe just thinks to himself. He could never decide if home was a place or a group of people, but it doesn't matter now, because he has neither, he is KIA; he is nothing more than a single black checkmark on someone's list.

***

"Wash. _Wash_. Wake up."

***

"Church! Church!"

" _His name isn't Church_ , Caboose, if you keep calling him that I swear to god-"

***

Washington goes from asleep to awake in about two seconds, and with a gasp and a jerk, finds himself sitting up bolt right in-

_a cell a cell they know you're in jail it's a cell-_

a bed.

He swings his feet to the edge of the bed and moves to stand, but finds himself doubled over, a hand pressed to his ribs.

_Agent Washington. Assess the situation._

He blinks. Glances around. The room is dark and quiet, and his armor is stacked neatly next to his bad. He pads frantically down his body and relaxes when he realizes that he is still wearing his Kevlar suit.

He stares at the armor for a few seconds, trying to figure out what's off about it, and then realizes that no, it's not some trick of the lighting, his armor is blue.

It comes back to him in a rush of color and sound. The smell of spray paint, and the electric green eyes of Church's body, and the biofoam tacking his skin together, and the crash of armor on armor as he fell out of the jeep-

"You're awake!"

Purple materializes out of the black, and Doc is there, taking a seat on a crate next to him. "Doc? Where am I?" 

"Well...we're not exactly sure," says Doc slowly. "We were on our way to Valhalla- the old base, you know- but it didn't look like you were gonna make it that far, so we stopped here. It's a simulation outpost, but it looks like it was abandoned."

Wash rubs a hand over his face, decides to put a pin in that topic, and squints at what appears to be a window. The sky is an inky blue, which can't be right, because- "how long was I out?"

Doc clears his throat. "Ah. Like. A day?"

"A _day?_ A full, 24 hour day?!"

"Give or take a few hours?"

Wash groans. "Great. Really great. What happened? Did I...pass out in the middle of the fuel station?"

"Well, I wouldn't really use the phrase _pass out_ ," Doc hedges. "Because that implies you were feeling a little faint from dehydration or heat exhaustion. As opposed to your body going into shock from multiple injuries and blood loss. But uh? Something like that. It's okay though! We got you back here, and you're gonna make a full recovery, so..." 

"How bad was it?"

"You mean, the extent of your injuries? Let's see," Doc counts them off on his fingers. "Several broken ribs on your right side. A graze wound from a bullet that just barely missed puncturing that some side. A ton of shrapnel in your left leg. A concussion- do you remember me waking you up several times? No? Well, I did. Caboose too. Anyway...that's it, aside from a whole bunch of bumps and bruises. But you pulled through."

Wash lets his forehead drop to his head and tries to peal back the layers of memory inside his skull. He remembers the fuel station, and the heat inside his helmet, but..."I don't understand."

"Yeah, you've said that. A lot."

"Well, I don't." He lifts his head and looks Doc square in the eye. "Why did you hang around to fix me?"

"I'm a medic. I took an oath." Doc shrugs. "It's the right thing to do."

"But I took you prisoner-"

"You said that, too. Funnily enough, I remember it." Doc takes a big breath in and blows it out slowly. "Look, Wash, if you want to apologize, then just do it."

Wash jerks back. "What?"

"You were an asshole. Seems like you kind of realize it. It also seems like you want to apologize but have no idea how to do it. So the way I see it, you can either stay in here and mope about all of your past asshole-ish deeds, or you can act like a normal human being and just, I don't know, say you're sorry to me and to the rest of the guys, and we can move on?"

Wash laughs, though the sound is empty. "It's not that simple."

Doc gives him a half-smile. "But what if it is?" When Wash just shakes his head, Doc sighs. "Look, if you don't mean it, you shouldn't say it-"

"It's not-"

Doc lifts up his hand. "But if you _do_ , then saying the words out loud can really help-"

"What, are you his psychiatrist now, too?"

Wash jerks his head up to see Tucker standing in the doorway in full armor, arms folded across his chest. "So. I see you're not dead."

He may as well have been commenting on the weather, for all the emotion the words contained. "It appears not."

"Does he have the all clear?" Tucker asks Doc.

Doc nods. "He'll be fine. He should take it easy for awhile since his ribs aren't one hundred percent- uh, Wash? Where are you going?"

Wash clambers gracelessly to his feet, bracing one hand against the wall for support. "Is there any spare armor in this base?"

Tucker stares at him. Wash isn't quite sure how he's managing to telegraph this much emotion through a full suit of armor, but he can practically see Tucker's bewildered facial expression and he hasn't even seen Tucker's actual face yet. "Uh, what? How about the armor that's piled _right next to you_?"

"I mean..." Wash waves a hand around vaguely. "I mean other armor. That's not Epsilon's."

"The fuck's wrong with Church's armor? I'll tell you what: nothing's wrong with it, it fits you like a fucking glove, and he sure as shit doesn't have use for it, so-"

Wash hesitates. "So you're saying you don't mind if I take it with me?"

"Take it where? You going on vacation or something? I mean, god knows you look like you need one, but it's the middle of the night and..."

Wash stares at him. Tucker stares back.

"I'm leaving," Wash says, and it means for it to come out sounding stoic and maybe a little bit dramatic, but he just winds up sounding confused.

Tucker exchange a baffled look with Doc. "Uh, to go where?"

Wash bristles. "I'll figure it out when...look, it doesn't matter. I...I do appreciate your help back there, but I..."

He can literally see the moment in which Tucker puts two and two together. "Wait. Wait, I think I get it. You're about to do the whole, _'I am going to leave this base in the middle of the night like some goddamned hero even though I can barely walk in a straight line because I am a lone wolf who needs no team'_ thing, aren't you?"

"Don't mock me."

"Dude, you fucking deserve to be mocked if that's seriously where your head's at."

"Well...I mean, maybe I'll wait until morning, if that's okay-"

"You're not fucking rolling out on us, we just evened the teams!"

"The teams?"

"The Red and Blue teams!"

Wash raises his eyebrows. "You know that's not...a thing..."

Tucker waves a hand. "Yeah, yeah, I know, but that's not the point. Look, you kind of owe us, okay? We already had one leader skip out on us, and I don't think Caboose can handle it if another does the same thing two days later."

Something clicks in Wash's own head, now. "Wait. You want me to be the _leader_ of Blue Team?"

"You cannot really be this dense-" Tucker pauses, tilts his head, then continues. "Did you think that whole scheme back there was just until we got away from the Feds? And then we were gonna boot your injured ass out of the jeep as soon as we were around the corner?"

"Well...yes."

Tucker snorts and looks as if he's about to make another snarky remark but pauses and looks at Wash, really _looks_ at him, in a way that's piercing despite the visor shading his eyes. "Well, it wasn't," he says instead, and, making an abrupt turn on his heel, leaves without another word.

Doc gives him a small smile and then stands as well. "You're out of the woods, but you should still rest. It's the middle of the night, anyway. Get some sleep."

Wash lays back down when Doc leaves, but his sleep is a fitful one. He jolts awake time and time again, and he isn't sure if it's the pain in his ribs that wakes him, or the nightmares bubbling just below the surface.


	4. 1.3: Navy

The first sliver of morning sunlight falls across his floor like the needle of a compass. Wash lets it draw him to his feet and stands in front of Epsilon's armor for awhile, the blue made shiny and bright by the rising sun. He pulls it on slowly, piece by piece, and he can't decide if each _snaphiss_ feels more like a beginning or an ending.

He takes the healing unit from where Doc had left it on the floor by his bed and fits it into the slot inside the chest plate, then turns experimentally. Tucker was right: the armor _does_ fit him like a glove.

His ribs and head still throb a little, but the feverish ache behind his eyes is gone, and most of his minor injuries seem to have healed. There's no more biofoam in his side, just a thick bandage that he can feel under the Kevlar suit, which has repaired itself while he slept. He strips and checks his battle rifle, ensuring that it's fully loaded and ready to fire before heading out of his room. 

The rest of the base is quiet, and Wash finds himself in a common area of sorts, complete with an old couch, television, and little kitchenette. There's a closed door behind which he assumes Tucker, Caboose, and Doc are still sleeping, and a sunlit corridor that leads to the outside. He follows this corridor until the bright, cool air hits his face. 

The scene is almost picturesque: bright sun, cloudless skies, fluffy green grass, and rocks. Thousands and thousands of rocks, in sizes ranging from boulders to pebbles. They seem to be in a valley of sorts, but instead of sloping walls cut from the mountain, there are loose rocks piling up the sides, with a waterfall pouring down the eastern wall. Wash wonders how they managed to get the jeep down here, as he can't see any clear roads leading in or out. His HUD tells him that the temperature is 54 degrees Fahrenheit, and after a little fiddling, it identifies four heat signatures present in the outpost. Wash frowns. He doesn't see how the four of them can be the only ones in the area, and instead of relaxing him, this information puts him even more on edge. 

He heads back inside, deciding to scout a little more thoroughly once everyone else is awake. His stomach is growling, and he wonders if there's any food in the base. To his surprise, he cupboards are reasonably well-stocked, and Wash almost gasps out loud when he finds _coffee_ , of all things, in one of the top cupboards. 

Coffee, _and_ a coffeepot, _and_ sugar. Wash has the pot going in seconds and after a bit more rummaging, finds a box of ration bars. He sets his helmet down next to the gurgling coffeepot and is halfway through his bar when the door cracks open, and Tucker shuffles out.

He's only wearing his Kevlar suit and lower body armor, but seeing as the armor is teal, Wash can confidently say that this is, in fact, Tucker. He's about Wash's height, maybe an inch or two shorter, and his build is all lean, lanky muscle. His skin and eyes are a dark, rich brown, and he's got a headful of dreads that fall to his chest. Wash can't help but wonder how he fits them under his helmet. He yawns and blinks blearily at Wash. "Am I dreaming, or do I smell coffee?"

Wash nods, and Tucker perks up a little and makes his way over. "No fucking way. I haven't had coffee in _ages_..." A rather ridiculous amount of banging around in the cupboards produces four mugs. Tucker pauses, then returns one to the shelf. "Yeah, the last thing Caboose needs is caffeine." 

Wash is inclined to agree. Tucker leans against the counter while the coffee brews and turns a shrewd eye on Wash. "I gotta be honest, I wasn't expecting you to be here in the morning."

"It's like you said. I don't have anywhere to go." He immediately regrets his words when Tucker raises an eyebrow. "I didn't mean that to sound quite so..."

"Dramatic? Yes, you did," says Tucker. "That's your thing." 

"It's not my _thing_."

"Sure it is. Like my thing is being charming, and Caboose's thing is being...well, Caboose. Yours is making everything you say as dramatic as humanly possible." He snatches the coffeepot the second it finishes brewing and pours three cups, pushing one over to Wash.

Wash startles a little at the nonchalant way that Tucker poured his and Doc's coffee, as if this were the sort of routine they'd had going for years, then hastily turns his sudden motion into a spasmodic reach for the sugar bowl. Tucker watches him add sugar to his coffee with raised eyebrows.

"Seriously, dude? You want some coffee with that sugar?"

"So I like my coffee sweet, big deal," says Wash, adding a fourth heaping spoonful to his cup. "Army coffee is bitter."

Tucker, who hasn't added a single grain of sugar to his own coffee, rolls his eyes. "So. Before the others wake up, how about you and I have a little chat about-"

"This place has coffee?" Doc's delighted cry sounds from behind them, and Wash turns to see him and Caboose standing in the doorway, neither one of them wearing a single piece of armor. 

Wash sighs. "Don't you think you guys should put your armor on as soon as you wake up in the morning?"

"Uh, no?" says Tucker. "First, food. Then armor."

"Oh? Then why do you have half of yours on?"

"Hey, we took a psychotic ex-Freelancer under our wing. I didn't know what the fuck I was waking up to. No offense."

Doc shuffles over and snags the remaining cup of coffee. "Thanks, Wash."

"Uh, yeah, sure..." Wash trails off and regards the scene in front of him. Two days ago, he was desperately trying to earn his freedom by working for the UNSC. Now, he is having his first morning coffee in ages in a simulation outpost with three guys he recently had no qualms about killing. He finds himself stealing glances at Caboose and Doc, as it's the first time he's seen them out of armor as well. Caboose is built like an ox, all broad shoulders and hands that looked like they could easily crush a skull, but there is something indescribably gentle about him. His hair is dark and curly, and Wash can tell that when it will be all dimples and teeth when he smiles. Doc is smaller and leaner, with dusky skin that isn't quite as dark as Tucker's and floppy, light brown hair. Wiry glasses cover a pair of light hazel eyes. Neither one of them is paying Wash the slightest bit of attention, but Tucker is openly staring at him over his coffee mug, and Wash has a feeling that their unfinished conversation from earlier won't remain unfinished for very long. "So, wise leader, what's on the agenda for today?"

"Leader?"

"Yeah. Didn't we have this conversation last night? Or do you have memory loss on top of everything else?"

"Well, I'm still not clear on some of the finer points of this...arrangement. I get you guys letting me onto Blue Team-" Wash pauses and reflects for a moment. "Well actually I don't, not at all, but let's pretend that I do. Why would you want me to be the leader?"

"Church was the leader of Blue Team," says Caboose matter-of-factly. "And you are now Church, in his old armor."

"I'm not Church," Wash says at the same time that Tucker snaps, "he's not Church."

Well, great. At least that's one thing he and Tucker see eye to eye on. 

"Anyway," Wash continues, "I don't see why you want me to be the leader-"

Tucker snorts. "What, you want Caboose to be the leader?"

"Well," Wash pauses. "I mean. Don't you want the make the decisions?"

"Are you kidding me? Why the fuck would I want to do that?"

"I don't know, how about, it makes more sense, you've been on Blue Team longer, you-"

"Yeah, no thanks, dude. The day I become a leader is the day Caboose becomes the commander of the UNSC."

"But-"

Tucker groans, banging his head dramatically on the table. "Dude, you need to _chill_. You're on Blue Team now. You're wearing Church's armor. You're the leader. Will you just fucking go with it and stop asking a million questions? Christ, you're a paranoid fuck."

Wash huffs out a breath. "I'm not-"

"Yeah. You are. And why the fuck are _you_ in full armor, anyway? No one else is here but us."

"That we know of."

Tucker raises his head from the table and squints at Wash suspiciously. "Do you like, practice these lines in the mirror or something?"

"I'm going to have a look around," Wash snaps, unholstering his battle rifle and striding towards the door. "And since I'm the _Leader_ , you can get your armor on and come help me scout this place out. Caboose too."

"Oh! I am very good at scouting!"

"Um," says Doc. "You're still injured, Wash. I think you should take it easy."

"I'm fine," says Wash. "Just...meet me outside. All of you."

Tucker mutters something under his breath, and Wash resists the urge to turn around and deck him. He paces around in front of the base, feeling agitated without entirely knowing why. Doc is the first to join him several minutes later. "They're good guys."

"I know," Wash snaps.

"It's just gonna take some time for you guys to mesh as a team-"

"I _know_." 

Doc lets him lapse into a sulky silence. Wash reflects on the fact that he just had an argument with a Simulation Trooper over who got to be the _leader of Blue Team_. An argument that he's pretty sure he lost. 

Tucker and Caboose join them shortly, fully armored with their guns unholstered. "Ready for some _scouting_ , Caboose?" Tucker asks sarcastically. Wash glares at him.

"I'm ready!" says Caboose cheerfully. "What are we scouting for, Church?"

"Yeah. What are we scouting for, Agent Washington?"

Wash takes a deep, steadying breath. "I just think that we should walk around. My HUD is only detecting the four of us in this outpost, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be other dangers-"

"Like what?"

"I don't know, _Private_ Tucker," Wash snaps, "Wasn't there a host-jumping A.I. trying to off you all not that long ago? Just-just look for anything out of the ordinary that could do us harm."

Tucker regards him. "Okay. Sure. Let's do that. And hey, why don't we split up? Caboose, you and Doc can investigate the opposing Red Base, and Agent Washington and I will scout out the rest of this valley. We'll meet back up in half an hour."

Doc is glancing between the two of them. "I don't know if that's necessary-"

Wash figures it's better to let Tucker get what he needs to say out of his system, so he just sighs. "It's fine, Doc. It'll be much faster this way. We'll be in touch on the radio if we run into anything suspicious."

"Okay," he says slowly. "C'mon, Caboose." 

Caboose and Doc head off, and Wash turns to Tucker. Without a word, they set off in the opposite direction, matching each other stride for stride. The moment they're out of sight, Wash stops and turns to Tucker. "Okay, look-"

"No, you look." Tucker makes this motion, as if he's going to like, grab Wash's arm or push him into a tree or something, but seems to think better of it. He settles for getting up in Wash's face. "First of all, I want the record to state that I initially voted to leave your ass lying in the snow and let the Feds sort it out."

"Great," says Wash. "Thanks for making that clear-"

"Second of all, I really fucking hate Caboose."

Wash blinks. "What?" 

"Caboose. He drives me up the goddamn wall. Doc too. And don't even get me started on the Reds. They're all batshit fucking crazy." He leans closer. "But if I have so much as a _bad feeling_ that you're gonna hurt any of them, I will fuck up your shit."

Wash isn't sure what to say, so he settles for the obvious thing: "I'm not here to hurt anyone."

Tucker snorts. "Yeah, you're gonna have to do a little better than that. You killed two of my friends. I want to know why. Start with Church."

"I didn't...he went into the capture unit-"

"Not that Church! The Church who you bullied into going with you into Freelancer Command!"

"Did anyone explain to you what Freelancer did to Alpha?"

Tucker shrugs. "A bit, yeah."

"Church-Alpha- he was the A.I. Freelancer used to make all of our A.I. And they did this by presenting Alpha with scenarios so stressful that he fragmented off bits of his personalities. They tortured him. Drove him mad. He deserved the chance to bring down the project who did that to him. He deserved to get revenge."

"Church deserved revenge? Or you did?" Tucker asks, and there it is, isn't it? The guilt that Wash has felt since Alpha bubbles to the surface, and he finds himself staring at Tucker, who shakes his head. "Well? You destroyed all the A.I. Great. Did it make you feel better?"

Wash thinks of the way the silence seemed to press in on his skull when Alpha jumped out of his head, and bleeding onto the floor at Freelancer Command, and of going days without speaking to another human in prison. "No," he says to Tucker. "No, it didn't."

Tucker shakes his head, all disappointment and disgust. "Great. Fantastic. So, after that pointless adventure, you come back to Valhalla in search of Church version two, because killing the first one wasn't good enough-"

"It wasn't- I didn't want to hurt Epsilon, I just needed his memories-"

"You needed. You needed, and fuck what anyone else needs, right? Who cares if a couple _Simulation Troopers_ are killed in the process?"

"I-"

"Donut was my friend," says Tucker, and the venom in his voice makes Wash take a step back. "We were stationed out there in the desert together, and he left to get help, and you killed him to save your own ass. Fucking Franklin Delano _Donut_ , of all people, who probably did nothing but get in your way, am I right?"

Wash says nothing. 

"So that's what your thing _really_ is, isn't it?" continues Tucker, and he shoves Wash back, hard. Wash lets him, lets him get it all out because he deserves this, after all. If Tucker were to try to shoot him right now, Wash thinks he might let it happen. "You kill people who get in your way, huh? What happens when Caboose gets in your way? Or Doc? Or me? How do we know you aren't gonna revert right back to your usual M.O? _How are we supposed to trust you_?" 

"What was your second vote?"

"What?"

"Your second vote." Wash shrugs. "You said you changed your vote, on Sidewinder. From leaving my ass there. Why?"

Tucker stares at him for so long and goes so still that Wash wonders if he's turned to stone inside his armor. "I don't know. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think Sarge has a point. About all of us, even you, getting fucked over by Freelancer." He throws up his hands. "I'm probably fucking crazy."

Wash waits, but Tucker has fallen into a silence that doesn't know if it wants to be angry or uncertain. "I'm not going to hurt anyone, Tucker. I promise. I know that's not...I know you have no reason to trust me, and I'm not asking you too. If you want me to go-"

"Jesus," groans Tucker. "no one said anything like that. I'm just giving you like, fair warning and all. I wasn't around when you offed Donut and let Church fucking delete himself, but I'm around now, and I'm watching you."

"Okay," says Wash.

"Okay then," says Tucker, and he starts off. 

"Uh..where are you going?"

"Back to base," Tucker says blankly.

"We have to scout out this outpost, Tucker."

"Wait, that was for real? I thought that was just an excuse for his to have this conversation."

"Of course it wasn't an excuse, we have to make sure this outpost is secure-"

"Fine, fine!" Tucker stomps back up the hill towards him. "Lead the way, oh wise leader."

They lapse into silence. It isn't comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, but some of the tension has left Tucker's shoulders. Wash, however, feels far worse than when they began the conversation. He was starting to realize- as Doc had said- that he'd been an asshole, but hearing Tucker speak of his past deeds with such vehemence had left him shaken. 

For Wash, the Director had been the face of evil ever since Epsilon's implantation. The things he had done and the lives he had ruined were breathtaking in their tragedy and Wash had been willing to do anything to make him pay, to exact his revenge. And yet...

_"Did it make you feel better?"_

_"No."_

And yet, and yet, and yet.

The road to revenge had turned him selfish and cold and utterly miserable. Wash thinks he needs a new road- to what, he isn't sure, but he wants one that will let him feel clean again.

_"If you want to apologize, just do it."_

_"It's not that simple."_

_"But what if it is?"_

***

They wander around the simulation outpost for about fifteen minutes in complete silence. Wash is grateful when a message blips on his HUD, and Wash opens the little envelope that pops up the Blue Team chat in the corner of his screen. Caboose has sent him a picture of a random rock formation. "What the fuck," mutters Tucker, staring at the picture that's clearly on his HUD as well. "Why did he send-" another blip from Caboose cuts him off.

CBS: HEY CHICKA BUM BUM

"Caboose!" Tucker furiously opens up their radio channel. "I told you to stop saying that! Besides, it doesn't even work!"

"But, ah, I don't understand," says Caboose. "You and Church used to send pictures of rocks to each other all the time, so-"

Tucker groans and slaps a hand over his helmet as if Caboose can actually see him. "Yeah, but that's because we found piles of rocks that made funny shapes! Like tits or co-"

"Okay," Wash interrupts. "I think we all get the point. Caboose, Doc. Have you seen anything interesting?"

"I just sent you an interesting picture, Church, but I can send you more if-"

"No no," Wash says hastily. "I meant...Doc? Anything?"

"Negative," says Doc. "How about you guys?"

"Nothing." Wash sighs, then pulls up a little tracking map that shows him how much of the outpost the four of them have covered. He sends it over to the rest of them.

"Well," says Tucker the moment the little map materializes on his screen. "Looks like we've covered pretty much all of it, then. Lunchtime?"

"I think we should do a second run through," says Wash. "Just to be-"

"A run through of what? We're in a _valley_. There's _nothing here_."

"There's such a thing as being thorough-"

"And there's such a thing as being a paranoid mother-"

"Alright," says Doc loudly over the radio. "Why don't we all meet back at Blue Base? It's been a long morning."

"We've only been awake for about an hour!" says Wash, incredulous. 

"And that's an hour more than you should be up and walking around," says Doc, and signs off the radio before Wash can reply.

He blinks. "Did he just... _hang up on me_?"

Tucker snickers. "Come on. Your babysitter says it's time to go home."

"Shut up," Wash snaps, and they make their way back to Blue Base in more silence. Wash will go back to prison before he admits it, but his ribs started to ache ten minutes ago and he thinks that sitting down might be nice.

Caboose and Doc are waiting for them at the entrance to Blue Base. 

"So. This place is abandoned," says Doc without preamble. "Weird, right?"

"Not necessarily," says Wash with a sigh. "All of these outposts are part of Project Freelancer, and Project Freelancer is basically over. It's possible that you guys aren't the only ones who figured out that the Red versus Blue conflict was a lie."

"I would fucking hope so," says Tucker. "It wasn't that hard to figure out.

Doc looks at them. "So what will you guys do now? Go to Valhalla?"

Wash shrugs. "I guess it doesn't really matter where we go, does it? Maybe we should stay here a bit. Stay off the radar."

"I think it's gonna look more suspicious if we stay off their radar than if we continue to dick around on it," says Tucker. 

"Well, regardless, you should stay here for a few more days until Wash is healed," says Doc.

"I'm fine- we can make for Valhalla-"

"Save it, dude," says Tucker, and he does his helmet-roll thing again. "I really, really don't want to get halfway to Valhalla, have you pass out or something, and have to come all the way back to...what's the name of this place, anyway?"

"Rockslide," says Doc, and they all glance at him. "It was on some board back at the base."

"Rockslide for all the funny rocks," says Caboose, as if this makes perfect sense.

"Alright, so..." Doc glances at Wash. "I think I should give you one more check-up before I head out."

"Head out?" Wash tries to sound as if this were a casual question of no real importance. "Where are you going?"

"To take the jeep back to Command. It won't be good if they come looking for you, will it?"

"No," Wash says quickly. "No, it won't."

"Come on," says Doc. "Let me change that bandage on your ribs."

Wash nods and follows him inside the base. He's not sure why the thought of Doc leaving makes him feeling...disappointed? _You aren't friends_ , he tells himself sternly, and yet Doc has been the first person to be _nice_ to him for no reason at all in a long time. He takes off the necessary armor and unzips the necessary Kevlar compartments for Doc to change the bandage on his ribs, and sits quietly while he works. 

"Well, your broken ribs are almost healed, and the wound where the bullet grazed your side is looking better. Another day or two of keeping this bandage on and you should be good." Doc glances at the healing unit pulsing inside of the blue chest plate that's resting next to Wash. "That's some tech you've got there."

His comment is an innocent one, but it somehow leaves Wash feeling even more guilty than when Tucker was yelling at him. The healing unit is a miraculous thing, and it has saved his life many times. He can hardly bear the thought, sitting here in this simulation outpost once filled with Blue soldiers who had no healing units to patch them up after the injuries they received from old Freelancer _training exercises._

The full, sickening weight of it, and of everything Tucker said, seems to hit him, and he stands abruptly, unable to stand the stillness or the silence. He hauls the chest plate back over his head so he doesn't have to look at the sinister green glow of the healing unit and snaps the rest of his armor back on.

"Wash?"

He's forgotten that Doc was there. "I can't stay here," he says, and the words come out high and strangled and fuck, he needs to get out of here _he needs to get out of here heneedstogetoutofhere-_

"Wash," Doc says, a little firmer this time, and he stands up, taking a step forward.

Wash shakes his head and scrambles back holding his hands palm up towards Doc, "No, no, don't, just don't-" he stops, watching his hands shake like leaves on a tree as if they belong to someone else, and the shaking climbs up his arms and slides down his torso and wraps his legs in their tremors. It spirals up his head until his teeth are chattering and he swears that his brain is shaking in his skull and how is he supposed to breathe when his lungs are trembling in his chest?

Doc says his name again, but the sound is so very far away, and Wash can barely hear him over the sound of his heartbeat racing in his ears, _thumpthumpthump_ , and something must have happened to the lights because everything is too bright yet black at the edges at the same time, and he needs to get out of here, he can't stay here in this outpost with these soldiers, he needs to _getoutofheregetoutofhere_ -

The world tips and sways and suddenly Doc is there, guiding him back to the edge of the bed and pulling off Wash's helmet. He gasps for breath as the air hits him, blessedly cool on the heat of his face. "Wash. Breathe."

The air on his cheeks refuses to make its way into his lungs, he can't seem to remember how to draw a breath, can't remember how to breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe-

"I need you to count with me. Can you do that?"

Wash drops his head between his knees, gripping the back of his neck with his hands. Dimly, he registers Doc crouching in front of him. "Just repeat after me. One."

The air he needs to begin counting won't come, and he shakes his head. Doc puts a hand on his arm. "You're okay. Come on. One."

He should shake Doc's arm off, he knows, but instead he focuses on the steadying pressure and sucks a breath in between his teeth. "One," he gets out, and the word ends up being more like four syllables, but it's a sound and it's there.

"That's great, Wash. Keep going. Two."

"T-t-two," he gasps, and then three, and four, and by the time he has counted to ten, he can breath again.

Wash sits there until the shaking stops, and when his body is still, he lifts his head from between his knees and finds Doc still crouched patiently in front of him. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," mumbles Wash, and he feels the beginnings of the familiar aches that sets in his muscles after an adrenaline dump.

Doc doesn't contradict him, doesn't point out the fact that Wash is a fucking mess, that he is probably the farthest thing from _fine_ that Doc has ever seen. "What do you need?" he asks instead.

"I need to leave," Wash says, so startled by the question that he can do nothing but answer honestly, and his voice gets that high and strangled note again, and he forces himself to breathe, breathe, breathe.

Doc nods. "Okay."

And Wash is even more startled by that, so startled that the panicky note drops right out of his voice. "What?"

"Well, I mean, I would prefer that you at least wait another day until your ribs are fully healed, but..." Doc shrugs. "If you want to go, you can go."

"I can?"

Doc laughs a little. "No one's holding you prisoner here, Wash." He winces. "Wait, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I'm just saying. If you want to go, go. If you want to stay, stay. It's your choice."

_It's your choice._

Wash tries to gather his thoughts, but they are scattered around his skull, drifting across the floor of his brain, and in the end all he can manage to say is, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"I think," says Doc slowly. "That you need to take care of yourself, for starters."

"No," says Wash. He doesn't know much, but he knows that putting himself first is the last thing he should be doing. "No. I've been nothing but selfish since Project Freelancer and-"

"I didn't say be selfish. I said take care of yourself." Doc takes a breath and exhales slowly, his bangs ruffling. "And for what it's worth? I think these guys could use someone to take care of them, too. I think you hanging around might end up being the best thing for all of you. But no one will force you to stay if you don't want to."

They sit in silence for a few more minutes until Doc stands up to stretch, his joints cracking. "Well. I'm gonna go see what kind of food they've got lying around here."

"I thought you were leaving?" Wash asks.

Doc shrugs nonchalantly. "Eh, I should probably stay another day to make sure you're fully healed. I'll take the jeep back tomorrow. Give you time to decide if you want to stay or not. And if you want to leave, you can hitch a ride. I'll drop you off wherever you want to go."

"You will?"

"Sure," says Doc, then pauses. "You gonna come take inventory of this food, or you wanna hang here alone for awhile?"

Wash looks at Doc. Turns and looks at his own helmet lying on the floor next to his feet. He picks it up and stares at the yellow stripe, and remembers the smell of spray paint in the snow, thinks of the little box marked KIA next to his name on a list somewhere.

_It's your choice._

"Yeah," he says, and stands up. "Yeah. I'm coming."


	5. 1.4: Royal

Wash doesn't speak much for the rest of the day, but he doesn't spend the time alone, either. He listens to Caboose talk about everything from Church to the rocks outside to the lack of chocolate in their base to Church to their old tank to Church again. He can't help but marvel at how Caboose never seems to run out of things to say, and watches in amusement as Tucker grows increasingly aggravated. Doc calls Command to tell them he'll be on his way the following day, and then organizes everything in their cupboards. They crack open some MREs for lunch and then for dinner, and wander around the base, and try to get the television to work, but only succeed in producing static. Wash opens the old Freelancer channel again and listens to the static on there, so soft and steady, and it's this sound, more than anything, that makes his decision.

If he leaves, he will have nothing but too many thoughts in his his too small brain, and the infuriatingly calm static where the chatter of his old friends should be. He doesn't know what he'll have if he stays, but there will be the voices of Caboose and Tucker and the bubble of an old coffeepot and the hum of the broken television. There will be _noise_. 

"I'm staying," he tells Doc before they all depart for bed: Tucker and Caboose in the second room, Doc on the couch, and Wash in what he thinks is the Captain's quarters.

"Okay," says Doc, and to his credit, doesn't push Wash for the reasoning behind his decision. "Night, Wash."

Wash dreams of static, of soft white noise in blank black rooms, and each time he jerks wakes he tells himself that tomorrow, there will be noise.

In the morning, there will be noise.

***  
Tucker doesn't bother putting on any armor in the morning, and neither does Caboose. Wash rolls his eyes at this, as he and Doc are already in full armor, although he suspects that this is only because Doc is getting ready to leave.

"You sure you're feeling okay?" Doc asks, and Wash can't tell if he's referring to his physical injuries or the full-blown panic attack he had yesterday.

"I'm okay," he says, and Doc nods.

"Just take it easy, okay? All of you."

"Hey, if you see the Reds, give them this for me, will you?" Tucker spins around and gives Doc the finger. 

Doc rolls his eyes. "I'll be sure to do that."

"Excellent. Later, dude."

"Try to stay out of trouble for a little while, okay?"

"Yeah yeah," says Tucker, then sighs as Caboose wraps Doc in a gigantic bear hug. "Caboose..."

Doc just laughs and breaks away from Caboose, snagging the keys from the counter and heading out he door. Wash sits frozen for a moment, something waring inside of him ( _get up - it doesn't matter - get UP - he's already gone - he's not gone just go tell him_ ) and jolts to his feet abruptly, following Doc out the door. Doc is in the jeep but hasn't started it yet when Wash catches up with him.

"Doc. I'm sorry."

Doc turns back around and Wash removes his helmet, tucking it under an arm. "I'm sorry," he says again. "For what I did. For hurting you. For letting Meta hurt you. I'm sorry."

There is no weight removed from his shoulders, but something loosens in his chest, like he is a balloon about to pop and someone has just let the air out. Wash can't see the look on Doc's face, but he can hear the smile in his voice as he says, "I forgive you. Forgive yourself too, yeah Wash?"

It's awhile before Wash moves again. He watches the jeep disappear with Doc, watches him drive it through a winding pathway through the rocks up the valley wall- now he knows how they got in, although he doubts he could've picked the pathway out on his own. Wash watches the jeep until it's just a speck in the distance, and longer still, until it is nothing.

He isn't sure how long he stands there, but eventually he hears movement, and Tucker appears next to him. He's finally put his armor on. "Thought maybe you took off with him."

"I said I'm staying, so I'm staying."

"Wow," Tucker huffs. "Don't sound so happy about it."

"I'm not..." Wash can't think of a single thing to say that will appease Tucker and be true at the same time, so he trails off. 

It isn't long before Tucker is speaking again. Wash is starting to suspect that, for Tucker, thirty seconds of silence is thirty seconds too long. "Sooo. Washington. That's your Freelancer code name, right?"

Wash finally turns to stare at him. "Uh, yes."

"Are you from Washington state?"

"No."

Tucker considers this. "Yeah, I guess that'd be dumb if they like, went out of their way to recruit a Freelancer from each of the fifty United States. Did you get to pick your name?"

"No, Command assigned us our names."

"That's kinda lame. How did they decide who got what name?"

"I have no idea," Wash snaps. "What does it matter?"

Tucker really is the master of telegraphing emotions through full body armor, Wash decides, as his whole body instantly telegraphs the fact that he is offended. "Geez, okay," he says, and they fall back into silence, and great, now Wash feels kind of like an asshole for nearly biting Tucker's head off. He thinks he should apologize, but then he would have to explain how he spent his first week aboard the Mother of Invention bombarding everyone with questions about their state name and trying to figure out the pattern the Director had used to decide them.

"I mean, Tex used to say that she was actually from Texas," says Tucker, apparently unable to resist. "So I guess that was just some sort of coincidence?"

Of all things.

Of _all of the possible topics_ Tucker could bring up, he wants to talk about Texas, which would be fine, except for the part where Allison grew up in Texas and bought her first house with Church there, an old ranch with a wrap around porch and an oak tree that had a tire swing slung over its lowermost branches and he remembers standing in the doorway watching Allison spin their little girl round and round both of them all blonde hair glinting like gold in the sun and-

"Uh. Washington? Helloooo?"

The name jolts him out of the memory, and he feels his body jerk a little. "I can't."

Tucker stares at him. "You can't what?"

"Freelancer. I can't- I can't- don't talk to me about Freelancer. Okay?"

"Suuuure dude. Whatever you say."

"And don't patronize me."

Tucker sighs loudly. "Okay, look, you really need to _chill out-_ "

"Sneaking, sneaking, sneaking."

They turn simultaneously to see Caboose crouched low, advancing on them from the door of the base. He stops when he sees Wash and Tucker looking at him, one foot frozen in midair.

If possible, Tucker sighs even louder than before. "What, Caboose?"

"Um, I heard raised voices," says Caboose."

"What?" says Wash defensively as Tucker turns to glare at him. "I didn't-"

"Everything's fine, Caboose," says Tucker. "Fucking great."

The three of them stand in silence that seems to go on forever: awkward for Wash, irritated for Tucker, and uncertain for Caboose. Wash sighs, and looks at the two of them.

 _You decided to stay_ , he tells himself sternly. _This is your team now. Get ahold of yourself._

"So," he says, and the awkward note to his voice is all too apparent, but he continues anyway. "How did you know about this place?"

Tucker regards him suspiciously for a moment before deciding to answer. "Doc. He's been here before, on a medical call, but that was ages ago. Didn't even remember the name of the place until we were inside the base. He thought the Blue soldiers could help us out, but turns out it was abandoned. Weird, right?"

"Not really," says Caboose, and then shrugs when the other two turn to stare at him. "Our bases are abandoned now, too."

"Yeah," Wash says slowly. "Yeah, I suppose they are."

Silence falls again, but it is somehow less this time: less awkward, less irritated, less uncertain. The world is utterly still, and it is as if they are the only things left, these three blue soldiers and one rumbling waterfall in the distance.

*** 

_The little girl runs across the field, hair streaming behind her like sunspray. There is a dog running too, a tiny brown thing, yapping and nipping at her heels. The girl stops her sprint and twirls in place, she was always so graceful, even in play, long before she learned how to use her body as a weapon._

_He watches her run and dance until she spots him, and her eyes light up. "Dad! Watch this! Watch what I can do!"_

_She stops and raises her arms above her head before executing a perfect backflip, then laughs and runs towards him. The world seems to grow darker the closer she gets, and then things shift there are men with guns and they are coming to take her away-_

_He screams her name and runs towards her- the dog is gone, where is the dog, he never knew what happened to the little brown dog with his pointy ears and it tore him up inside, not knowing-_

_but the girl is still running until the soldiers open fire and she freezes in place. He screams, how he screams as the bullets pierce her skull, but she does not crumple, she merely looks at him as the bright red seeps slowly down to hair, roots to tips, turning her blonde hair red. She is utterly still and her features turn from fear to hurt to ANGER-_

_one of the soldier grabs him (how did they get behind him how he doesn't know) and shakes him and says, "you need to breathe-"_

_He can't breathe and he looks for the little girl but she is gone now, and he screams and screams and screams and lunges at the soldier and tackles him to the floor and wraps his hands around his throat and-_

"No, no, NO, NO, NO!"

The anger in that voice shocks Wash awake, because he has never heard Caboose sound like that, had never imagined that Caboose could sound like that. Wash's feet leave the floor and his back hits the wall, hard, and he finds Caboose's furious face inches from his own.

 _Caboose, Caboose, Caboose_. Terror is racing through his body, because Wash doesn't know where he is, or why it is dark or even _what is own name is_ , but he knows the soldier in front of him and wraps his fingers in Caboose's shirt and holds onto that like a lifeline. The rest comes back in pieces: _you are Agent Washington. You were KIA. You are the new leader of Blue Team. You are at Rockslide. You were hurt. Doc left. You went to sleep and had a nightmare and-_

a sort of gasping-cough sounds from somewhere in the room, and the rest of Wash's senses return in a whoosh of dim color and sound. His eyes rove behind Caboose and he sees Tucker pushing himself weakly off the floor, and he _remembers,_ remembers Tucker trying to shake him awake in that endless moment where he can never tell if he's still dreaming, remembers lashing out and tackling Tucker to the floor and-

"Tucker," he says, and makes as if to move towards him, but Caboose shoves him back into the wall.

Tucker shakes his head, one hand massaging his throat and the other waving him off. "M'kay," he rasps. "Caboose, m'kay." He starts to stand, but half collapses back down in a spectacular stumble. Caboose lets go of Wash then, breaking Tucker's fall and hauling him to his feet.

Wash doesn't dare move away from the wall. "Tucker," he says, and there's something desperate and raw in his voice. "I'm sorry, I..."

But Caboose has an arm around Tucker and is leading him out of the room, leaving Wash frozen against the wall in his captain's quarters. He sinks to the floor, and presses the heels of his palms to his eyes until little stars explode against the black.

***

He does not sleep for the rest of the night. 

Morning finds him with his back still pressed against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest and hands wringing restlessly. The moment the sun rises he's on his feet and pulling on Epsilon's armor, barely able to look at it. He steps out of his room-

and stops when he sees Tucker and Caboose already seated at the counter. 

Wash is immediately distracted by the fact that neither of them are wearing any armor _again_ , which, considering the crazy ex-Freelancer almost killed one of them less than twelve hours ago, seems stunning in its stupidity.

Tucker clears his throat and purposely slides a cup of coffee across the counter. Wash takes a hesitant step, then another, then another, then removes his helmet and takes the coffee in between his palms. He finds himself unable to look at either of them, so he busies himself with adding sugar to the mug and tries to present a reasonable picture of sanity.

"So Doc failed to mention that your nightmares were _that_ bad," says Tucker without preamble, and okay, apparently they're not going to just pretend that last night never happened.

Wash forces his eyes up and is about to reply- although what he would've said is a mystery- but the words falter when he gets a good look at Tucker's throat. There are bruises marring his otherwise smooth skin, purple against the dark brown of his neck. Bruises in the shape of handprints. _Wash's_ handprints. He can feel the blood leaving his face and he brings his hands up to his face and just _stares_ at them. 

"And now I'm kind of starting to think that maybe you didn't know they were that bad either." Wash looks up to find Tucker watching him. Tucker shrugs. "I probably shouldn't have tried to shake you awake. That was pretty fucking stupid of me."

Wash blinks. "Is that what happened?"

"Well yeah. You were screaming your fucking head off so I tried to wake you up, and well. It kinda just made things worse."

"Tucker, I'm..." he clears his throat. "I'm so sorry. That was unacceptable. And it...it won't happen again. You can lock me in my room at night, or I can go..."

"Don't start with that again," Tucker warns, but there's no real venom in his voice. "Like I said, I just won't grab you or anything next time."

Tucker's utter calm is, somehow, putting him even more on edge. "Tucker, I could've killed you. If Caboose hadn't..." he still can't bring himself to look at Caboose, but can feel the other soldier's eyes on him.

"But he did. Look, we've all tried to off each other at some point or the other. It's like, a right of passage on Blue Team."

"That's an interesting initiation process," says Wash, and then turns to Caboose with a sigh. "Caboose, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt Tucker."

Caboose regards him solemnly. "Then why did you?"

Wash winces a little at the brutal honesty in his tone. "I was dreaming."

"Was it a bad dream?" 

"Yeah. It was."

"I have bad dreams sometimes," says Caboose, then seems to consider Wash. "I forgive you, Church."

"...Thanks, Caboose...but you know that isn't my-"

"You're like, really fucked up, aren't you?" Tucker asks through a mouthful of food.

Wash doesn't see the point in trying to deny it. "Something like that."

"Wanna talk about it?"

"No."

"You sure?"

_"Tucker-"_

"Alright, alright." Tucker holds up his hands. "You're probably gonna have to at some point though dude. Just saying."

Wash thinks that the day he talks about his nightmares with anyone will be the day he gets an honorable discharge out of this mess- so, never- but just reaches for the sugar bowl to add another scoop to his coffee. "How did Doc know I had nightmares?"

Tucker gives him a strange look. "Uh, didn't you and the Meta haul his ass around the desert for like, weeks? You must've slept during that time. Meaning, you've must've had dreams"

"But..." Wash frowns. This information bothers him, and he's having a hard time figuring out why. "I don't remember waking up from any nightmares in the desert."

"I gotta say, I don't think you _would've_ woken up if I hadn't gotten the bright idea of shaking you." He raises his eyebrows at the confused look on Wash's face. "Did you really not know?"

"No I...I know that I have...bad dreams-"

"I think that was a little more than a bad dream, dude-"

"But I..." he stares into his coffee mug and tries to assemble his thoughts. He remembers the dreams, of course, in sickening clarity. He even remembers jerking awake, occasionally even with a surprised yell. 

But there is only one time that he remembers someone waking him from a nightmare before, many years ago.

It was after they had implanted Epsilon into his head, during those disastrous few days on the Mother of Invention that he had tried to pretend that everything was going just fine with his new A.I. The first night, he had woken to Epsilon pumping memories and adrenaline and panic into him, and he didn't know if the nightmare was his or Epsilon's, he only knew that they both screamed and screamed until Maine had slapped them awake.

He remembers Maine's hands on his shoulders, the only steady things in a world that seemed to shake and shake, and the frown line of concern in between his eyes. No one in their room had gone back to sleep that night, not Wash, not Maine, not Epsilon, not Sigma.

But then things had gotten even worse and they'd pulled Epsilon and he was waking up in an infirmary and then he was alone as the place went up in flames around him-

Wash pauses, takes his thoughts apart, and puts them back together again. He thinks of his time in recovery, of his time in prison, of his time in the desert with Doc and Meta-

and not once, _not once_ since that first time with Maine can he remember someone shaking him awake from a nightmare. If they were as bad as last night, so bad that Doc had to warn Tucker about them, then-

"No one woke me up," and he doesn't realize he's said the words out loud until Caboose and Tucker glance up at them. "From a nightmare. No one has woken me up from one before."

"That's fucked up," says Tucker. He shrugs at the confusion on Wash's face. "I mean. I don't see how you could listen to someone scream like that and not try to wake them."

The shameless honesty in Tucker's voice shocks him, and he thinks of the concern in Maine's eyes back on the M.O.I. The meta's utter indifference to his nightmares shouldn't affect him so much, but his stomach twists sickeningly and he can't help but wonder what Doc must've thought.

"I don't understand you," he snaps suddenly at Tucker, who startles.

"Um, what?"

"I could've killed you last night. You made it pretty clear that you didn't trust me when we were scouting the base, so I don't understand why you're not throwing me out now!" Christ, he's _yelling_ now, and he tries to dial back the hostility in his tone but he's too full of anger and something that might be shame if he were willing to look at it carefully. "How can you be this trusting? It's going to get you killed! Why-"

"Doc has a theory." 

Tucker's voice is so calm and succinct that it brings Wash's volume down significantly. "What?"

"A theory." he takes a sip of coffee, exchanges a look with Caboose, then looks Wash dead in the eye. "He thinks that it's been a long time since you've felt...normal. Happy. Safe. Whatever. He thinks that if we give you a chance to be like, a regular dude and all that shit, then we might...you know...not hate each other."

"Well, what he said was, we might be friends," Caboose says. It's the first time he's spoken in awhile and he sounds reasonably more cheerful at the night at having more friends. "Maybe we will be best friends. I am very good at having best friends."

"Alright, Caboose, don't make it weird," Tucker huffs. "Look. I'm just saying, we're giving you a chance here. You're obviously ten kinds of fucked up, so to be honest, it's not a real shocker when you have nightmares or panic attacks-"

Wash pales a little. "You know about-"

Tucker waves him off. "-or whatever the fuck else you've got going on. I'm not saying we're here to like, be your shrinks, I'm just saying that you're obviously trying to work through some shit. You don't have anywhere else to go. We don't have a leader. It works. Stop trying to take off every time shit gets a little weird. We're used to weird. Just go with it. Okay?"

Wash looks at Tucker's exasperated face, and at Caboose's trusting one. He sighs.

He goes with it.


	6. 1.5: Cobalt

Going with it, Wash decides, includes not trying to strangle any of his teammates in a nightmare fueled haze of panic. Tucker dons his armor soon after their morning coffee, hiding the bruises from sight, but Wash feels sick and shaken whenever he thinks of his handprints, ugly and purple on Tucker's neck.

So when the night comes, it finds him sitting crossed legged on his bunk, watching the moon move across the sky. He thinks inexplicably of Connie, and of how the starlight looked in her soft brown eyes. "Sometimes I think I joined up just to see stars like this," she had told him once, when he'd found her sitting on the observation deck in the middle of the night.

Wash fiddles with his radio and pulls up SierraNovember99 and listens to the static until it starts to lure him to sleep. He jerks awake and angrily turns the radio off. _Connie is gone_ , he tells himself as he makes his way to the kitchen, and he sits at the breakfast bar with his forehead on his hands until the blessed morning comes again.

***

"Are we going on an adventure today, Church?" Caboose asks him brightly as he bounds into the kitchen. Wash has already changed into his armor and made coffee, and is doing his best to appear refreshed and rejuvenated. 

"I..." He actually has no idea what the hell they're going to do today, or what they're going to do for any of the following days, for that matter. "Well, uh. What do you guys usually do?"

There's a very pregnant pause. Caboose and Tucker exchange a long glance during which Wash can practically see a variety of ridiculous situations playing out. Tucker clears his throat. "Well, when we're not getting sucked into some bullshit Freelancer mission...we uh...I mean..."

Wash raises his eyebrows.

"Hey, it's been a long time since I've been holed up in one of these bullshit bases," Tucker says defensively. "Donut and I were out in the desert for awhile getting shot at every goddamn day." He pauses to reflect on this, then brightens. "You know, maybe this base isn't so bad after all. No bickering Reds either. God, I could use a vacation. What do you say we get the television here working?"

"I think," says Wash, "that a more effective use of our time would be scouting out the valley-"

Tucker groans. "Again? Dude, there's _nothing here_. If anyone had joined the party, we would've heard them."

"Are you kidding? We can't hear a thing over that waterfall!"

" _You_ just hate fun."

"I do not-"

"Oh, really? Then what _do_ you do for fun?"

Wash sputters for a moment, then looks between Tucker and Caboose. "Just...just make sure your guns are loaded and follow me, alright?"

***

Their stroll through the valley proves to be an uneventful one. A part of Wash is almost disappointed by this, as Tucker's muttered _I-told-you-sos_ grow increasingly smug as the walk continues.

"Okay, okay," Wash finally snaps. "At least we're sure now." He throws himself onto the couch, removes his helmet and gestures around with it. "By all means, do...whatever it is you usually do with your free time."

"Oh, we have free time? That's just great," bubbles Caboose. He sits down on the other side of the couch, pulls out his datapad, and goes curiously silent.

Tucker leans agains the wall, folding his arms and regarding Wash. "You really hate not having a plan, huh?"

"Well, we're going to need one eventually...we can't just stay in this base forever-"

But Tucker is shaking his head. "You still don't get it. That's exactly what we're going to do. I mean, not _forever_ forever, but...look, the UNSC thinks that Agent Washington is dead. They don't give a shit what Privates Tucker, Caboose, and Church are doing. If we start running around causing trouble or like, going on heroic missions, we're gonna draw attention to ourselves. I hate to break it to you, dude, but you can't act first, this time. We have to wait for something to happen. We have to react."

Wash thinks about this. "We have to be on the defensive, is what you're saying."

Tucker does his patented exasperated helmet roll. "Sure, sure. We need to deploy defensive strategies. Abort all offensive missions until further notice. Whatever gets you off."

Wash sputters. "What- do you have to word it like _that_ -"

"Of course I have to word it like that! Have you met me?" He snickers. "Wow, dude. Fucking freckles everywhere and your face turns as red as a tomato when you're uncomfortable? Oh, annoying you is gonna be _so fun_ -"

"What does the fact that I have freckles have to do with anything?!"

"Well, I don't know if anyone's ever told you, but they make you look like you're in high school. It's hilarious."

"Shut the fuck up, Tucker."

Tucker snickers himself into silence, then- thankfully- turns his attention to Caboose. "Caboose, what are you doing over there, anyway?"

"Writing," Caboose answers serenely, without even glancing up from his datapad.

"What?" Tucker walks behind the couch to peer over Caboose's shoulder. "Since when do you...write...wait, _are you writing Harry Potter fanfiction?_ "

"My fans have been waiting very patiently for the next chapter," Caboose says in a haughty sort of way.

"You can't..." Tucker removes his helmet and squints at the screen. "Oh my god, Caboose, if you're gonna write a self-insertion fanfic you have to at least change your _name_ -"

"Yeah, but my followers really enjoy reading about the adventures of Caboose."

"But-but that's not how good fanfiction works-"

Wash raises an eyebrow. "And how does good fanfiction work, Tucker?"

Tucker doesn't look phased in the slightest. "Well, for starters, if there's not any smut in it it's not worth reading-"

Wash groans and lifts himself off of the couch. "I'm going for a run."

The paranoid part of him- which is, admittedly, a very large part- thinks that going for a run in a strange valley with no power armor on is a terrible idea, but Wash does it anyway. He finds a pair of shorts and sneakers stashed in the locker in his captain's quarters, ignores Tucker's protests of "uh, it's fucking _freezing_ outside, do you have a death wish?" and starts out the door.

It is on the chilly side, but the exercise warms him up soon enough. Wash tries to remember the last time he ran like this, and thinks it must have been well before Freelancer. He'd run when he could on the _Mother of Invention_ , but there was a huge difference between running laps on a ship and running outside with the wind in his hair. He focuses on the slap of his sneakers against the ground, and lets the sound wipe his mind clean. 

Wash finds himself on a low ledge across from the waterfall, gazing into the crashing foam below. The water is so very bright and blue and beckoning, and he lets it pull him in. He unlaces his sneakers with a slow and deliberate precision and places them neatly at the very edge of the cliff face. 

It's not flying, when he jumps, but it's close enough, somehow nearer to the actual thing than floating through space in power armor. The water is shockingly cold, and as his head breaks the surface it takes him a moment to catch his breath again. He closes his eyes, letting the roar of the waterfall fill his ears and relishing the feel of the water piercing his skin, somehow cleansing in just how cold it is.

***

Thirty minutes later, he makes his way back into Blue Base, shivering and shoeless. Tucker has taken his seat on the couch and is peering over Caboose's shoulder in an impatient sort of way. "C'mon, type faster, I wanna read the next part-" he does a double take at Wash as he enters. "Dude, what the fuck? Where are your shoes? Why are you all _wet?_ "

"I fancied a swim," Wash says, only it comes out more like "I f-f-f-fanci-e-e-ed a s-s-s-wim," and Tucker's eyes nearly bug out of their head.

"You jumped in the _waterfall?_ Are you fucking _mental?_ It's _fifty degrees outside_ -"

"Well," Wash says, in as dignified a manner as he can manage with his teeth rattling around in his skull. "Now you know what my idea of fun is."

Caboose glances up from his datapad. "Can I go for a swim, too?"

"No," snaps Tucker, and flops back against the couch. "Jesus Christ, am I the only one here with any kind of common sense?"

"A scary thought, isn't it?" says Wash, and he makes his way to the showers.

He turns the water as hot as he can get it, and stands there until it grows cold. By the time he has put his armor back on and wandered back into the common area, Tucker has Caboose's datapad, his eyes zooming back and forth as he reads.

"Huh. Nice. I didn't see that coming." He hands it back to Caboose and glances up at Wash. "Well? You reach your daily quota of theatrics for the day yet?"

"That depends," says Wash. "Have you two reached your daily quota of laziness yet, or are you ready to actually do something productive?"

"I am working very hard over here, Church," says Caboose, wounded.

"Yeah, he's working very hard," Tucker says with a grin, then appears to consider Wash's words. "what do you mean by productive? You wanna scout out the valley for the millionth time?"

Wash shrugs, rummaging in the cupboards for their stash of ration bars. "I could show you guys some Freelancer fighting techniques."

"Psssht, do I look like I need to learn fancy Freelancer techniques? Once I get out my laser sword and go all swish swish stab, it's game _over._ "

"What if someone takes your sword?"

Tucker snorts dismissively. "No one's gonna take my sword." He pauses. "Besides, I still have my gun."

"What if someone takes that, too?"

"No one's gonna-" he eyes Wash. "Then I'd just, you know, tackle them and take all my shit back."

Wash stares at him. The silence stretches on.

"That's your plan?" he says finally. " _Tackle them?_ While they're armed, and you're not? While you're both in full armor?"

"Yep."

"That is the worst plan ever. Of all time."

Tucker huffs. "I'm telling you, it would work."

"Okay." Wash finishes his ration bar and takes all of the ammo out of his battle rifle. "Show me."

"What?"

"I want to see such a high-level technique in action." He holds his hand out towards Tucker. "Give me your weapons. Caboose, help him move the couch."

"What- I'm not giving- I'm not showing you-"

"Why not? Because you know it won't work?"

Tucker narrows his eyes, then slaps his gun and sword into Wash's upturned palms. "Okay, fine. Caboose, help me clear the floor."

Wash takes the ammo out of Tucker's gun as Tucker and Caboose move the furniture to the sides of the room. He straps the rifle to his back, secures the sword on his leg, and hefts his own gun off the counter. Tucker faces him across the room, arms folded stubbornly.

"Alright," Wash raises his empty battle rifle and points it at Tucker. "I just disarmed you in a fight. Take your weapons back."

Caboose takes a seat at the breakfast bar. "Oh! I'll keep score!"

Tucker does a surprisingly decent feint to Wash's left before lunging in for a low tackle at his midsection. Wash sidesteps this easily, then dry fires the gun at Tucker's flailing form. "Boom. Now you've got a gunshot wound in the back."

"Point Church," says Caboose unnecessarily. 

Tucker straightens and glares at him. "Well, he was expecting it-"

Wash rolls his eyes. "I promise you, that would not have worked even if I wasn't."

"Alright, then, what would you have done?"

"Use your environment. Put a barrier between you and your opponent, or find something- anything- that you can use as a weapon. When you see an opportunity to take your gun back, control _that_ , not the opponent. If you try to control the opponent, the risk of you getting shot is much higher." Wash unsnaps the weapons and holds them out to Tucker. "Watch."

Tucker takes the weapons grudgingly, holding Wash's own rifle up. "Alright, let's see it."

Wash darts backwards, snatches one of the couch cushions, and whips it in Tucker's face. He sidesteps the gun, gets one hand on the muzzle and the other on Tucker's wrist, and twists it cleanly out of his hands, leaving Tucker sputtering and staring from his hands to the rifle. "What the fuck! How did you do that?"

"Just what I said. I used the environment, and I controlled the weapon, not you. Here, I'll show you," he says when Tucker still looks confused. "Caboose, come here."

Wash hands Caboose the rifle as he bounds over happily. "Now, look. I step off to the side, put one hand on the barrel and the other on his wrist, and _twist_ -" he demonstrates, and the gun comes away again. "You try."

Tucker faces off with Caboose and attempts to recreate the move. "No no no, you have to get off the centerline-"

"I am off the centerline!"

"All you did was move your shoulders a little. You have to step off to the side- _step with your feet, Tucker-_ better! Now put one hand on the muzzle and one on Caboose's wrists-"

"Like this?"

"No, like-" Wash peels Tucker's hands away and repositions them. "There. Now twist- good!"

Tucker looks faintly surprised to have the gun in his hands. "Huh."

"You try it, Caboose..." and to Wash's surprise, Caboose manages to disarm Tucker with only a few corrections as well. "Well done. Now do it again, but faster."

"Bowchickabowwow," mutters Tucker under his breath, but he and Caboose both do the move again until Tucker is groaning, "okay, okay, we get it, Jesus...."

Wash steps back, feeling oddly pleased. "So, there you go. Obviously, the first step is to not lose your weapon in the first place, but if it does happen...remember, use your environment and control the weapon, not the opponent."

"Hmmm." Tucker eyes him appraisingly. "Well. If we ever have to defend this empty valley, we'll know just what to-"

Which is precisely when the sounds of a spectacular crash echoes in the distance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some Blue Team sillies before it gets a little angsty. :x
> 
> Thank you all for your kudos and comments!! I appreciate each and every one!
> 
> > My best friend and beta [Minimax](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniMax) made me some BEAUTIFUL PAPER CUTOUT FANART THAT I AM GOING TO SCREAM OVER FOR THE REST OF MY GODDAMN LIFE for the waterfall scene in this chapter. It's [here](http://littlefists.tumblr.com/post/139889265629/smashes-into-your-ask-box-agent-washington) if you want to take a look!!


	7. 1.6: Ultramarine

Wash has his helmet back on and his rifle reloaded before the crash finishes bouncing around the valley. Tucker's sword hisses to life moments later while Caboose blinks at them both owlishly. 

"Caboose, get your helmet on and ready your weapon," Wash snaps. "Tucker, cover me."

To Wash's surprise, Tucker does cover him, loading his rifle and following Wash to the door. "I'll take the left," he says, and they edge outside, scanning the valley with their guns ready.

"Anything?" Wash asks.

"Nothing," says Tucker from behind him.

"Nothing," Caboose confirms from inside the base. "Yeah, everything's fine in here..."

"It sounded like a...crash," Wash says tersely. "But..."

They pause as the sound of bickering voices reaches their ears. 

"Oh, for the love of..." Tucker lowers his rifle and sighs. "It's the fucking _Reds_."

_"What?"_

Wash spins around and, sure enough, there are three soldiers in Red armor making their way down the rocky walls of the valley. "How did they...why are they..."

"Dude, I have no fucking idea." Tucker fiddles with his helmet, and a moment later his voice crackles to life on the shared channel with the Reds. "What happened to your plane, dipshits?"

Wash watches the tiny figure of Grif put his hand up to his helmet, then glance around. "Tucker?"

Tucker waves his arms in a resigned sort of way. "We're over here."

"Grif, don't you take a single step towards that Blue Base!" 

"Why not?"

"Because it's a _Blue_ Base!"

"We don't actually have to go inside of it," says Grif. "but maybe we should go talk to them to find out if they have medical equipment. Or, you know, more importantly, food."

Sarge pauses in the distance, and Wash notices that he's leaning rather heavily on Simmons. "Leader of Blue Team! We would like to propose a temporary truce and exchange of information!"

Wash glances between Tucker and Caboose, who has wandered outside of the base- no weapon, but he has at least put on his helmet. Both of them are staring at him expectantly. "What?"

"He's talking to you, Church!" Caboose stage-whispers. "You're the leader of Blue Team!"

"Oh..." Wash clears his throat. "...Yes. We accept the truce. And we do have medical equipment."

Simmons freezes in the distance. "Is that _Washington?_ "

"Of course it's Washington," says Tucker. "It's sure as shit not Church. What, did you miss the part where Church checked out of this freakshow back on Sidewinder?"

"I meant why is he still _with you_ ," Simmons says through gritted teeth. 

"Okay, can we have this conversation down there?" Grif's voice is impatient. "With the food?"

The Reds make their way down to the Blue Base in a sulky sort of silence. Grif and Simmons each have one of Sarge's arms slung over a shoulder, and as they get closer, Wash can see that he isn't putting any weight on his left leg. Simmons noticeably tightens his grip as they come to a halt in front of the Blues.

Tucker looks them up and down. "What the fuck happened to you guys?"

"Apparently, _someone_ doesn't know how to land a Hornet, let alone _fly_ one," grumps Sarge loudly.

Grif swells indignantly. "Hey! It was _your_ idea to steal a plane in the first place, _sir_ -"

"Because you said you knew how to fly it!"

"I said I could probably figure it out. There's a difference."

"Where's the Hornet now?" asks Tucker.

Simmons clears his throat. "In pieces about three miles back. We figured we'd walk until we found something, and ended up here..." he trails off. "Where _is_ here?"

"Rockslide," Caboose says proudly. "For all of the rocks."

"Great," mutters Grif. "Another fucking canyon."

"Actually it's more of a valley." Caboose nods, as if agreeing with himself. "Yeah, a canyon is cut out of rock walls, and-"

" _Whatever_ , Caboose," groans Grif, then lets go of Sarge and flops to the ground. "So, _does_ this shithole have any food in it? I'm starving."

"No surprise there," says Tucker. "Caboose, go get some ration bars. And the medkit. You owe us if we need supplies, though," he says as Caboose disappears inside the base. "Red Base is pretty well stocked."

"You went inside Red Base?" asks Sarge, although they may as well have slaughtered a village of small children for all the indignation his tone held.

"We had to make sure there were no surprises or killer robots or some shit waiting to murder us in our sleep," says Tucker.

"Defiled! Despoiled! Desecrated!" Sarge howls, and Tucker sighs.

"Okay, you know that Red Base and Blue Base are the _same thing_ , right? Didn't we already have this big revelation?"

Sarge considers this. "Still doesn't mean I want any dirty Blues slopping up my base!" 

"I think Grif takes care of the slopping on his own," mutters Simmons.

"You've got a point." There's an almost minuscule wince of pain from Sarge as he inadvertently puts weight on his leg. 

"What happened to your leg?" Wash asks quietly, when it appears that no one else is going to address the fact that Sarge is still using Simmons as a crutch. 

Simmons instantly tenses back up. "Why do you care?"

"I just-"

"Seriously, _what the fuck is he still doing here?_ "

"Looks to me like he's leading Blue Team," says Grif casually, then groans in relief as Caboose reappears and hands him a ration bar. "Excellent."

"I have the medkit too, Church," says Caboose as he hands to it Wash.

Wash closes his eyes briefly as Simmons sputters. "Did he just call him _Church?_ Oh, this is just gonna be a fucking picnic-"

"Simmons, calm down and have a ration bar," says Grif around a mouthful of food. Wash does a little double take once he notices that Grif has his helmet off. His face is scruffy and square and utterly indifferent to the current situation. He has dark hair that he keeps tossing out of his two different colored eyes- one brown, one green- and Wash thinks he might be Hawaiian or Samoan.

"A ration bar?" Simmons' voice pitches even higher, and Wash pulls his eyes away from Grif. "How can you think about food at time like-"

"Simmons, put me down already!" snaps Sarge. 

"Yes sir," mutters Simmons, and he lowers Sarge to the ground.

"He fell down half the rock wall," says Grif, by way of explanation. "So if you heard a gigantic crash, that was it."

"Really?" says Tucker, unimpressed. "You tripped over some rocks? Christ, looks like you really jacked up your knee. Way to go. How did you even manage that in power armor?"

"It's just a bruise!" says Sarge impatiently.

Wash winces as Sarge removes his left shin and thigh guard. The knee is twisted at an awkward angle, and looks swollen even through the Kevlar. He also doesn't miss the fact that Sarge is breathing low and shallow through the pain of what Wash suspects is a dislocated knee. "I think it's a little more than a bruise."

"Oh, someone give me a Band-Aid and I'll be fine."

"We have many bandaids, in many colors!" Caboose already has the medkit cracked open and is rifling through the stock of them enthusiastically. 

"Well, as long as it's a red bandaid then we should be in business!"

Wash rolls his eyes, and unsnaps his healing unit. "Here, take this-"

Three words and three steps towards Sarge are as far as he gets before Simmons moves in between the two of them and gets his gun up in Wash's face. He's fast, much faster than anyone would expect, but it still takes all of Wash's reflexes to not shoot Simmons out of pure instinct.

There's a collective intake of breath as everyone stills- Grif in mid-chew, Caboose with his hands full of colored bandaids. "Don't," says Simmons lowly, "go _near_ him."

But it doesn't sound like Simmons at all. There's no hesitation or stuttering in his voice, and Wash knows with absolute, clinical certainty that if he takes one step closer to Sarge, Simmons will blow his head off. The curve of his shoulders is the same curve that Tucker's held two days prior, when he promised retribution if Wash hurt his friends.

Wash raises his hands slowly, the healing unit in one and the gun in the other. He holds his gun out to the side with his finger nowhere near the trigger. "Look, I just want to give him my Freelancer healing unit-"

"We don't want _anything_ from you," Simmons snarls.

Wash wants nothing more than to remove himself from this situation, to turn and walk straight out of this valley, but he roots himself firmly to the ground and continues determinedly. "I think he has a dislocated knee. That will take weeks to heal and if it's bad, he could even lose the leg. The healing unit will speed up the process and help him to feel more comfortable." He holds it out in front of him, but doesn't break Simmons' gaze. "I'm going to hand it to you now, to give to Sarge. You could put it on the ground next to him, but it's more effective if you snap it into the slot inside his chestpiece. If you'll let me, I can pop his knee back in and splint it. I have basic field medic training."

Simmons doesn't lower his gun. Grif sighs loudly, snatches the healing unit from Wash, and drops it on the ground next to Sarge.

"You have to turn it on, you idiot," says Tucker.

Grif surveys the healing unti with a frown. "I don't see a button."

"Turn it over," says Wash, and Grif finally clues in and presses the button. The green glow washes over Sarge.

Sarge both sighs in relief and tries to prevent himself from sighing in relief. "Huh. That's some gadget you got there."

"Tucker." Wash holds his gun out towards him. "Come take my gun from me. My pistol and knife, too."

Tucker hesitates. "Uhhh, I don't know if that's a good idea..."

"Just do it."

Once Tucker has disarmed him, he holds his hands out palm up towards Simmons. "See? I'm unarmed. There's five of you and one of me. Will you let me look at his leg?"

Simmons still hasn't moved and Grif sighs again. "Look, if he doesn't, we're gonna be carrying his ass around for the next month."

"Fine," Simmons grits out. "If you make one wrong move-"

"You'll shoot him, we got it."

Simmons finally half turns to regard Grif furiously. "Why am I the only one who doesn't trust this guy?"

"You're not," says Grif with a shrug. "I'm just trying to be practical. Which is supposed to be your job, by the way, so thanks for making me do it. One wrong move, we shoot him. Got it. I'm on board."

This seems to appease Simmons slightly, and he gestures with his gun towards Wash. "Go on. Get to it."

Wash gathers the appropriate supplies from the medical kit and kneels next to Sarge. He tenses when he feels the press of Simmons' rifle against the back of his helmet, directly above his neural implants, and the supplies tumble out of his hands.

"Simmons, ease up," snaps Tucker. 

Simmons doesn't ease up, just tells Tucker to fuck off, and keeps his gun pressed firmly into the back of Wash's head. Wash forces his hands to unclench from the grass and fights down the panicky nausea that's settled in his gut. 

With a deep breath, he focuses his attention on Sarge's leg. "It's dislocated, alright."

"Just get to it, Blue," Sarge says impatiently. Wash puts his hands on Sarge's leg and pops the knee back in before Sarge can tense, or before Simmons decides to shoot him and be done with it. They all wince at the sharp crack that seems to echo around the rocks. The healing unit helps to take the edge off, but Sarge still lets out a grunt of pain that he hastily turns into a hacking cough. 

"You'll need to take it easy for a few days," Wash tells him as he grabs the materials needed to bind the knee. "Keep the healing unit close and try to stay off of it."

"Great," says Grif, although he hasn't touched any more food since the sickening crack of Sarge's leg. "So what you're saying is, we get to wait on him hand and foot."

Wash focuses on splinting Sarge's leg, a little surprised by hiss lack of snarky comments during this whole endeavor, and does his best to ignore Simmons and the gun pressed to his head. Caboose sorts the bandaids by colors, and Tucker stops Grif from hiding the entire box of ration bars in various crevices on his armor. 

"Does this mean we're all friends again?" asks Caboose brightly once Sarge's leg has been splinted.

"No, it doesn't," snaps Simmons. "Get away from him," he tells Wash, and Wash slowly stands and turns.

"I want you out of this canyon," Simmons says. "You're not welcome here."

"Yeah, Church is the leader of Blue Team," says Caboose. "So uh, I think he needs to stay."

_"His name isn't Church-"_

"Also," Tucker interrupts. "Wash is on Blue Team. You're not. So it's not really your decision, dude."

Simmons shakes his head, but seems to have finally reached a state of agitation that's beyond words.

The Reds make for their own base after the healing until has done significant work on Sarge's leg, although Wash insists he keep it for another day or two. The three of them hobble off, Sarge supported between Grif and Simmons, and as their shapes turn to shadows in the dying light, he can't tell where one begins and the other ends.

The moment they're out of sight, Wash turns on his heel and strides into Blue Base with the panicky feeling in his gut threatening to overwhelm him. It's too much: the mistrust from Simmons, the resounding crack of Sarge's knee, the unbearable helplessness of his implants exposed to a hostile force. He strides up and down their small common area, trying to marshall the thoughts zinging around inside his brain.

"Hey." Wash turns to see Tucker holding out his weapons, Caboose not far behind. "Here."

"Just...just put them on the counter," Wash mutters, and resumes pacing.

"Simmons was out of line," Tucker says after a moment of watching Wash walk circles around the room.

"No, he wasn't," Wash snaps. "He was right. About everything. I killed their teammate. I betrayed their trust. He has every reason to hate me."

"Wash-"

"If he knew- if they knew what I did the other night, that I almost killed another friend-"

"Hey, I'm not friends with them," Tucker says jokingly. Wash doesn't smile. "Oh stop, you didn't almost kill me-"

"Tucker! You were- you were-" but he can't do it, he can't vocalize the way Tucker's body had started to go limp and still under his hands right before Caboose had burst into the room, can't think about just how near a thing it had been. "Don't, just don't..." he takes a few deep breathes, and Tucker quiets.

"Why do you keep holding the back of your head?"

Not until Tucker mentions it does Wash realize that he is unconsciously cupping both palms over his implantation site. He forces his hands down. "I just..."

"Do you need a hug, Church?" Caboose asks him.

"No," Wash says, moving backwards a few steps. "No, Caboose. I don't need a hug."

"That really bothered you, didn't it?" Tucker asks. "You're like, really freaked out."

"I'm..." Wash stops pacing, drags his hands away from his implants again. "I don't know how to fix this."

"It'll work out, dude." Tucker shrugs when Wash looks at him incredulously. "Hey, you're still here, right? Shows you want to fix it. That's a start. He'll come around."

Wash isn't sure if he believes Tucker, and that night during his brief bouts of sleep, he dreams of shooting Donut, of shooting South. He paces around the outside of the base until the sun rises, and he thinks about leaving, but he doesn't.

 _You're still here_ , Tucker had said. Wash doesn't know if it counts for anything, and he doesn't know if he can fix what he's broken, but he remembers Doc saying "I forgive you," and thinks he has to try.


	8. 1.7: Sapphire

The next two days are filled with such tension that Wash thinks he might snap from the strain of it.

He first runs into Simmons and Grif again when doing his daily perimeter check around the valley with Caboose. The sound of something rustling had made him stop, and he and Grif wound up rounding the corner at the same time with their guns pointed in each others' faces. Wash thinks it a small miracle that nobody ended up with a bullet in their forehead, and when Wash and Caboose make their way back into Blue Base, Tucker looks up in alarm.

"What happened?"

"How do you know something happened?" Wash asks defensively.

"Uh, because you're back thirty minutes earlier than you usually are, and I'm guessing it's not because your paranoia let up for once."

"...Fine. We ran into Grif and Simmons."

"And...?"

"And let's just say I'm amazed I'm standing here talking to you. I almost shot Grif." Tucker groans. "Hey! He almost shot me, too! We just...startled each other!"

Tucker eyes him. "You're a magnet for trouble, aren't you?"

"You could say that."

Four hours later, Grif strolls casually into Blue Base in the middle of lunch. "The orange one is here," Caboose announces, and Wash whirls around at the counter.

"Our MREs suck," Grif says by way of greeting. "Wanna trade?"

Tucker rolls his eyes and slams one in front of Grif. "Weak, dude. _Weak._ What do you want?"

Grif jerks his head at Wash. "So, like. We sure this is a good idea?"

Wash throws up his hands and storms off. Caboose finds him outside the base shortly after and sits next to him. "I wanted to make sure you were still here."

"I'm not going anywhere, Caboose." It comes out a little sulkier than he intended, but he means it all the same.

"Okay."

They sit there until Tucker materializes in front of them, folding his arms. "You two done brooding yet?" 

"No," says Caboose, and Tucker sighs and flops down next to them.

"Caboose," he says to Wash, "just told Grif that if he doesn't- and I quote- have anything nice to say about _his best friend Church_ , he shouldn't say anything at all. So that went well, as you can imagine."

"He was being mean," says Caboose, unruffled.

Wash sighs. "Well, if anyone is monitoring this valley, they're getting one hell of a show."

Tucker looks rather startled at that. "Monitoring? You mean, they have cameras in the Simulation Outposts?"

"Well, yeah. To keep tabs on their experiments. And also for performance reviews after Freelancer missions."

Tucker considers this, then shrugs. "Ah, well. If there were cameras in Blood Gulch, they got an eyeful, that's for sure. This one time Grif's sister and I-"

"Okay, I'm gonna stop you right there," Wash interrupts hastily. 

"Your loss. Because, let me tell you, it was the good kind of show." He sighs. "Not like this depressing as shit soap opera."

***

The nightmares are so bad that night that it takes Wash nearly an hour to fully calm himself down after he awakens. Even then, the shaking doesn't stop. He feels slightly delirious the next morning, and his HUD helpfully informs him that he is averaging two hours of sleep a night. He removes his helpful helmet and throws it across the room.

The three of them are all rather irritable that morning, and Wash can practically feel similar vibes floating across the valley from Red Base. He thinks about going for another run to burn off some nervous energy, but settles for taking a walk to retrieve the sneakers he left by the waterfall.

The water is still bright and blue and beckoning, and Wash thinks almost longingly of yesterday: the icy cold water, and of Caboose's stupid fanfic and the way Tucker tried to hide how pleased he was when he successfully executed the disarming technique Wash had taught him.

"This is so weird," Tucker moans later that afternoon. The three of them are mulling around outside the base. "Like, they're not even coming over here to insult us or anything. It doesn't feel right."

"Yeah," Wash agrees, and Tucker looks up at him. "Trust me, I got quite the feel for the antics and insults when you were in the desert, and we were on our way to Command. It was annoying, don't get me wrong, but this _does_ feel weird."

"Maybe," says Tucker hopefully. "We could like, bust over there...and try to steal their flag?"

"Seriously? Capture the flag? You think that's a good idea? To charge on over there with guns blazing?"

"I'm just like, throwing out options here!"

"Whatever happened to 'it'll work itself out?'"

"Yeah, well. That was before I realized how depressing this shit was gonna be. Maybe we'll just..." Tucker trails off and jerks suddenly, and shading his eyes against the setting sun. "Oh no. Here come the Reds."

Wash instantly feels anxious. "What? Why?"

"Dunno..."

The three of them watch the Reds approach in silence. Sarge gives a little cough once they come to a halt, and holds the healing unit out to Wash. "Here." He pauses. "...thanks."

Wash steps forward hesitantly, but doesn't take it. "It's only been two days. Your leg can't possibly be done healing."

Sarge puffs up his chest, indignant. "I'm walking on it, aren't I?"

"Just because you can put weight on it doesn't mean it's finished healing," says Wash, exasperated. "It even looks as if you're still limping."

"He _is_ still limping," Simmons says, albeit reluctantly. 

Wash sighs. "Just keep it for a few more days, it's not like anyone else needs it right now."

Sarge mutters something incomprehensible under his breath, and Tucker glances over at Grif. "Uh, translate that?"

"He says he can't abide being indebted to a Blue," Grif says, monotone. 

"It's not- you won't be indebted to me, that's not how this works-"

Sarge tilts his head somewhat shrewdly. "I don't know how you Freelancers operate, but around here, we have a _points system_ -"

"We do?" asks Grif. Sarge ignores him.

"A give and take, so to speak! If you have a temporary truce with an opposing team, and that team grants you assistance, then you're in their debt until the assistance has been replicated-"

"But we're not opposing teams anymore," Tucker says impatiently. 

"Course we are!" Sarge pauses, reflects. "Well. Sort of. The point is! Agent Itcy-Trigger-Finger-lancer over there gave me his fancy glowing unit, and the longer I keep it, the longer the list of debt grows!"

Wash rubs a hand over his visor. "Sarge. There's no debt. Just keep the healing unit until your leg is fully healed. Okay?"

"But it is fully healed! Look!"

And Sarge proceeds to start hoping around on his leg, which _of course_ causes him to stumble, and then Wash is reaching out to steady him and the next thing he knows Simmons gets his gun up in an automatic sort of way and everyone freezes.

Wash slowly drops his hand and gazes around at all of them, noticing not for the first time that they all move together. He looks at the way Simmons has stepped in front of Sarge, and how Sarge puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder and Grif has moved up half a step on Simmons' other side. He sees how Tucker puts himself in between Caboose and the action, sees the way they're all watching, waiting, together. 

The bond between these men is an almost tangible thing, and Wash wonders if they can see it, if they can feel it, if they can understand its rarity. It makes something raw beneath his ribs ache. He is torn between frustration at their naivety, and something that's one part bitterness and one part jealous longing. It hits him, all at once, that there is nothing he regrets more in his life than what he has tried to do- what he has _done_ \- to the bonds between them.

Nothing breathes, not even the wind.

There is a line drawn in the sand, Wash thinks, and he is on the side where there is nothing but cold iron bars and static on dead radio frequencies and purple handprints. He could stay here, he knows. He could leave, turn away, and tell himself that he _tried_ , and over time, he might even be able to make himself believe that. 

Or he could step over the line on the long road back to good, and he could say-

"I'm sorry, Simmons."

The utter stillness of the world is such that Wash thinks he can see its fault lines, crystallizing in the air around them. "I'm sorry, Sarge, Grif...Tucker, Caboose. I'm sorry that I...that I killed Donut. And Lopez. I'm sorry that I asked Church to come with me into Command, and I'm sorry that I tried to bring Epsilon to the UNSC. I'm sorry that I made your lives hell. I'm not asking you to forgive me and I don't know if my presence here is going to make things better for you. There's a very good chance that it'll make things worse. But I'm...I'm here, now, and I'm planning to stay. I want to stay. If you'll have me."

The wind breathes. 

Simmons says, "Why?"

Wash hesitates. "Why, what?"

"Why did you kill Donut?"

"He got in my way." Simmons jerks back a little at that, and Wash shakes his head, disgusted. "All I wanted was to get out of this mess. I didn't do so well in prison, and I was willing to do anything to not go back. I'm not proud of it. In fact, I regret it more than...more than you know. There's been a lot I regret since Freelancer, and I want..."

"You want to what?"

 _Revenge. Closure. To go home. Where is home, Agent Washington?_ "I want to make things right," he says, and he thinks that's the truest thing of all.

There's a long pause before Simmons says, "Okay."

Wash starts. "What?"

"Just, okay. I don't like you. Or forgive you. Or trust you. But. If you want to stay. Then okay."

"Okay," Wash says as well.

" _Now_ are we friends again?" Caboose asks, and Tucker groans. 

***

So the days go like this:

There is coffee with the sunrise and MREs for breakfast, and sometimes Tucker manages to make something decent out of the various boxes of pasta and cans of vegetables. They wander around the valley until they've combed every square inch of the place. No one comes looking for them, and no one tries to contact them on the radio. 

One day Wash finds himself sitting next to Tucker just outside of their base, both of them only wearing about half of their armor and staring off in opposite directions. Wash looks around them at the quiet valley, and sighs. "So, this is it? This is really what you guys do all day?"

Tucker yawns, stretches, leans backwards until his shoulders hit Wash's. He settles in as if preparing for a long nap. "I mean. Sometimes we go start shit with the Reds?"

They sit there like that in silence for several minutes, until Tucker says, " _Wanna_ go start shit with the Reds?"

Which leads to a ridiculous afternoon of capture the flag and insults and bartering for various items in their respective base, and _that_ leads to Grif discovering a miraculous cache of _beer_ in the bowels of the their storage closet. It is too precious for to even try to barter- "and besides, I can't get drunk with just Sarge and Simmons, please get over here Tucker, and I guess you can bring Caboose and Wash, fuck it"- so they all end up in Red Base making their way through the bottles.

There's not really enough for the six of them to get drunk, but the sheer luxury of having beer makes them a little giddy. Their helmets and gauntlets and chest pieces end up strewn in hapless piles around the base, and Wash marvels at Simmons' cybernetic eye and the fact that Sarge looks just like a younger Colonel Mustard. He's seen them all without their armor now and wonders if this means something.

Sarge is regarding him just as critically. "How old are you, boy?"

"I'll be thirty-three..." Wash pauses to calculate. "Two weeks from today, actually."

"Good god. You're all babies. They recruiting in pre-school these days or something?"

Tucker has his elbows on his knees and is watching Wash with a thoughtful expression on his face. "I gotta say, I wasn't expecting you to be our age. I thought you'd be way older."

"Unfortunately for you, those ridiculous freckles make you look about twelve," says Grif.

Wash huffs as they all snicker around him. "Why does everyone always _say_ that?"

"Doesn't do much for the whole badass Freelancer thing you got going on, does it? No wonder you never take your armor off." Grif is cracking himself up, and Wash chucks someone's gauntlet at his head and then proceeds to beat him handedly at five games of poker in a row.

So the days have a sort of loud peace and pointless perfection to them that Wash decides not to question. Simmons still won't turn his back to him, Caboose insists on calling him Church and he sometimes catches Tucker tracking his sudden movements. He could not call them friends, but he thinks he can- sort of- maybe- probably- call them his team.

The nights, though, go like this:

Wash sleeps, but no more than is absolutely necessary. He can feel the nightmares lurking at the edges of even his fitful doses, and they leave him with a hazy sense of panic. Most nights, he finds himself seated at the breakfast bar, going through his datapad or simply staring out the window. There is a deep exhaustion setting in his bones that fills him with a nameless terror, and he dares not fall into it, for fear that he won't be able to pull himself back out again.

About a week or so into their time at Rockslide, Tucker stumbles sleepily into the kitchen at 3am when Wash is seated at the counter with his datapad open in front of him. Tucker shuffles to a stop and blinks, as if trying to decide whether or not he's dreaming. "Dude. What the fuck are you doing?"

"I couldn't sleep," says Wash, which is, after all, the _truth_ , so he tries to keep the guilt off his face.

He isn't sure if he succeeds, because Tucker seems to wake up a little at that. "You aren't out here every night, are you?"

"Of course not," Wash says quickly. "What are you doing up?"

"Needed some water," says Tucker easily, and he does indeed shuffle over to the sink.

Wash does a double take as Tucker stands at the sink and downs a glass of water. He's facing away from Wash, and he isn't wearing a shirt. There are incredibly intricate tattoos covering his entire back, in blue ink that almost seems to be glowing, and the text looks like-

"Are those _Sangheili_ tattoos?"

Tucker twists around. "Hell yeah. I got them while I was in the desert. Some kind of ritual. You know, since I had Junior, and because of the prophecy and all that. Apparently I'm the only human to ever get them." He considers. "They hurt like a son of a bitch, so that's probably why."

Wash isn't entirely sure he wants to know the answer to his next question, but morbid curiosity prompts him to ask, "How did you...deliver Junior?"

"C-section." Tucker yawns. "That hurt like a son of a bitch too, come to that."

"They kind of...glow," says Wash, still staring at the tattoos. "What ink did they use?"

"I'm not sure, but it was some sort of organic substance. Probably got it out of the bottom of a muddy lake somewhere."

Wash frowns. "Is it safe?"

"Well, I've had them for awhile and I'm still kicking," Tucker jokes. "You got any ink? Army tattoos, or anything like that?"

Wash shakes his head. "None."

"Gotta remedy that someday." Tucker yawns again. "Really though. You're gonna get some sleep, right?"

Wash nods his head mutely. Tucker wanders back off to bed, and Wash is left feeling guilty without fully understanding why.

***

Several days go by before Wash decides that they should probably have some semblance of a plan.

He should have started asking the hard questions sooner, he knows, but something has prevented him from doing so each day. Mainly, the fact that he has no idea what he wants to do beyond setting things right.

It has also been so long since he has had the opportunity to be still, and there's something about watching these soldiers bicker and chase each other around the canyon that's cathartic. Still, he knows they can't stay here forever, no matter what Tucker thinks. It's only a matter of time before the UNSC checks up on this base, or sends someone looking for them.

Wash voices these concerns to Sarge one afternoon when it's just the two of them, standing on an outcrop that gives a good view of the entire valley. He's not surprised when Sarge seems unconcerned about their predicament. "No one's going to come looking for us, Washington. They never cared what we did until they needed to send a Freelancer in for training." He shrugs. "And seeing as you're the only one left, that's not likely to happen anytime soon, is it?"

Wash doesn't ask how Sarge knows this. "I guess not."

"Freelancer is dead," says Sarge. "And we're all that's left of it."

"If only that were the case," Wash sighs. "There's still the Director. People should...they should know what he did. They should know what Freelancer did."

Sarge finally turns to look at Wash. "Why does that matter? Is it so important?"

Wash opens his mouth to say that yes, of course it's important, it's the only important thing, but he can't quite do it. "I don't know," he says instead. "Doesn't it matter to you? Getting revenge for what they did?"

"Revenge is overrated, Wash," says Sarge, and there's something in his voice that promises a story behind those words. "No one's looking for you here. Maybe you shouldn't go looking for them."

"So we just...what? Stay here, forever? Don't you all want to go home?"

Sarge is quiet for awhile, looking out at Grif and Simmons arguing in the valley below them. "Home is overrated too," he says finally. "But you know that already, don't you?"

Wash does. 

"I say we take it day by day. If trouble finds us, we deal with it then. If not..." Sarge shrugs. "Well, maybe we make a home here. By the way," he unsnaps Wash's healing unit, and hands it out to him. "Here." 

Wash regards him suspiciously. "Is your leg really better this time?"

"Yup," says Sarge breezily.

Wash sighs, but reaches out and reluctantly takes the healing unit. "Fine, but...if it acts up, come get this from me. Okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever you-HEY! GRIF! What in Sam Hill are you doing!"

And he's gone, storming down the rocks. "Watch your leg!" Wash bellows as he almost face plants again. He sighs and snaps the healing unit back into its proper place, watching the Reds bicker below him, unable to figure out exactly what it is they're yelling about. 

He wonders if Sarge is right- if revenge is overrated. If he should just let go. But he thinks of Alpha, and the fragments, and the Director getting away with what he did, and he isn't sure if he can.

_Freelancer is dead._

It is an almost automatic thing for him to pull up his old teammates' channel and listen to the static. He isn't sure why he keeps doing this, but it has become a daily ritual, much like the morning coffee. He only ever listens for a minute or two. It is something of a reminder, perhaps, of where he has been, and where he is now.

A solid thirty seconds go by before Wash realizes what's off about the static filled channel:

There is no _static_ on it.

There is _breathing_.

Wash is already standing still, but everything inside of him comes to a howling _halt_. For a moment, he thinks it is merely the echoes of his own breath cycled back to him, but then he holds his breath-

and still he hears a quiet, almost undetectable inhalation, followed by an open-mouthed exhale. 

_Command_ , he thinks wildly, but no, it can't be, Command never had this channel, this was the frequency that Alpha team used when they didn't want to be heard on a mission or when they were trying to coordinate whose turn it was to sneak beer on the MOI. No one should be able to access this channel, no one, because they are all dead, he is the only one left- 

Wash exhales. The person on the other end does the same, and they remain there, frozen, listening to each other breathe-

A low, numbing buzz begins in his head, filling him with a sort of panicked disbelief. He wonders if he is dreaming, or if he has finally snapped and lost the mind he'd worked so hard to piece back together, because this is impossible, _impossibleimpossible_ -

Wash switches off the channel and rips off his helmet, hurling it away. Moments ago, there was nothing but breath, and now there seems to be none.

 _Okay_ , he tells himself. _Breathe. Count to ten. One-_

_The ceiling falls around him in bits of flames and it makes him think of the meteor shower he watched with Allison on their front porch - no, that's not right, there was no Allison there was no porch - he tells Epsilon to stop but there is no Epsilon anymore, just a raw ache at the base of his skull from where he was pulled. Wash raises himself up on his elbows but doesn't get much father than that; there is a wooden beam across his legs that he can't get a good angle to remove, and now the alarms have started blaring, crashing and clanging, red emergency lights flashing._

"Two." He can't panic, he can't, he can't-

_He tells himself not to panic, tells himself that they will come for him soon. It takes him a few tries to key in the code for SierraNovember99, but he manages and gasps, "North? South? What's going on?"_

"Three."

_A staticky silence fills his ears, and he frowns, tries again. "York? Are you there? I'm in the infirmary, I can't move..."_

"Four."

_He fights down the rising wave of panic. "Guys? What's happening? Are we under attack?"_

"Five."

_There is no answer, but he knows they will come. He presses his hands to his head as if that could mute the sound of the alarms, and he tells himself, they will come, they will come, theywillcometheywillcometheywillcome-_

"Six."

_they will come-_

"Seven."

_But they don't._

"Eight."

He wrenches himself out of the memory, dissembles it and puts it back in its box; grits out, "nine, ten," and forces himself to keep breathing. _You have a new team now_ , he tells himself, _you cannot go to pieces around them, they need you, they-_

"Wash?"

Of course. Of _course_ Tucker would come looking for him _now_ , when he had spent the entire morning prior lounging around the base.

Wash takes a quick inventory. He has managed to keep his feet, and although he is standing with his fists clenched staring off into space, the shaking has stopped. He decides that he presents a reasonable picture of sanity, and turns-

to see Tucker standing a few feet away, holding Wash's helmet. "Why the fuck was your helmet on the ground twenty feet away?"

Wash coughs, says, "Um."

Tucker raises his eyebrows. 

"It was hot," he says, right as a chilly wind blasts through the valley. 

"Our helmets have temperature controls," says Tucker suspiciously.

"Yeah, thanks, I...." Wash can feel his face turning red, so he snatches his helmet from Tucker and pulls it on.

Tucker looks as if there are many retorts running through his head, but he settles for, "You good, dude? You look pretty freaked out."

"Great. I'm great. Everything's great," Wash says. "Let's...let's go check the valley."

"Oh, come on! Do we have to do this every goddamn day-"

"Yes, we do, Tucker, just because there wasn't a threat yesterday doesn't mean there can't be one today..."

"Fine," grumps Tucker, and he trudges off behind Wash. "You _sure_ you're good?"

"I'm fine."

***

He is not fine.

The rest of the day passes in something of a blur. He finds himself jolting and saying, "what?" whenever he realizes five seconds too late that someone is speaking to him. Tucker shoots him a suspicious glance whenever this happens, but he doesn't say anything, for which Wash is grateful.

That night, during one of the sporadic bursts of rest he allows himself, he falls too far into a deep sleep, the kind that lets nightmares slip in. He is trapped in a burning infirmary but the details are wrong, Epsilon is still in his head this time and they watch their teammates come into the infirmary one by one before walking away, unable to see them. The flames are getting closer and closer, but the beam across his leg has him trapped, and Epsilon screams at him to move as the flames lick at his armor-

Wash is thrashing so violently that he tumbles out of bed and hits the floor, a scream halfway out of his throat. He manages to choke it off and turn it into a sort of agonized gasp, but he is still trapped, trapped, trapped-

He finally frees himself from the sheets tangled around his body and skitters backwards until there is a wall at his back. His hands curve around his implantation site, searching for the chip that he needs to get out get out get out- but no, there is no Epsilon, there is no infirmary, there is no one, no one at all.

Adrenaline propels him to his feet, and he finds himself stumbling into the kitchen, trembling so hard that it's difficult to remain standing. He presses his palms to the counter and tries to steady his stuttering gasps.

"Agent Washington?" 

Wash turns around to see Caboose standing in the doorway, rubbing a hand over his hair, making it even fluffier than it already is. Caboose shuffles over to him and asks quietly, "are you okay?

"I'm..." _fine_ , he means to say, wants to say, but the word will not come.

"Did you have another bad dream?"

Wash just nods, and he's aware the his hands are still shaking, so he clenches them into fists. 

And then, he's not entirely sure what happens, but suddenly Caboose is moving in and wrapping his arms around him, and the utter, unexpected shock of the thing freezes Wash in place. "My sisters used to say that hugging realizes a chemical that makes you feel better," he says. "I have seventeen sisters."

Caboose continues to stand there with his arms around him, and shows no signs of moving anytime soon. Wash's hands are still clenched in fists at his sides, and he wants to pull away, should pull away-

but he can't-  
quite-  
_do_ it.

He tries to remember the last time someone hugged him like this, hell, even the last time someone _touched_ him that wasn't born of necessity arising from combat or injury, and he can't quite do that either, so he lets his arms come up- slowly, stiffly, inch by inch- and wrap around Caboose. There's something brewing in Wash's chest, some great howl of misery that's threatening to claw it's way out of him, and soon he's screwing up his whole face to keep it from spilling out-

"Jesus _Christ_ , dude." Tucker's voice sounds from across the room. "When was the last time someone gave you a _hug_?"

Wash thinks he should like, stoically pull away from Caboose and march back into his room and never speak of this again, but there's another thing he can't quite do, so he just says, "I can't remember," and closes his eyes.

"Come over here, Tucker. We are having Blue Team Group Hug." Caboose says this as if it's a pre-established ritual. Tucker mutters something like _jesusfuckingchristonacracker_ under his breath, but then he's heaving the world's loudest sigh and moments later, Wash feels his arms wrap around the two of them. 

"This is for science," Tucker says after a minute or two.

"What?"

"It's called oxytocin. The chemical your brain releases. Oxytocin."

"I think you're saying it wrong," Caboose informs him.

"I'm not saying it wrong, Caboose." Tucker pauses. "What you really need, Wash, is fifteen different kinds of prescription _drugs_ , but since that's not an option, you get a hug instead. It's just like, basic science and shit. This is an act of charity."

"For science?" Wash asks, trying to hide the smile in his voice.

"For science." Tucker confirms.

They stand there, in a messy three way embrace, and there are no more words, only the roar of the waterfall, blue and unceasing in the distance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End part one. :)
> 
> A few things!  
> ->The interlude is next and it's really short (like...REALLY short) so when I post that, I'll have the following chapter up ASAP to make up for it.  
> ->Tucker having the Sangheili tattoos on his back is probably my very favorite fanon concept. I've read it in many fics, and I have no idea who originally came up with it. If anyone happens to know, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due!  
> ->The little moment where Wash and Tucker are sitting in the valley and Tucker says, "sometimes we go start shit with the Reds," was inspired by this lovely piece of fanart by ashleystlawerence: [here](http://ashleystlawrence.tumblr.com/post/128407129212/i-bet-wash-had-a-very-hard-time-adjusting-to). Something about it really stuck with me, so I put it in and it worked perfectly. Go check her out!  
> ->If you tumblr, I'm over @[littlefists](http://littlefists.tumblr.com). My blog is pretty much me freaking out over RvB fanfics/fanart/gif sets these days, but come say hi if that's your thing!  
> ->Thank you to everyone who has left kudos or comments (seriously, some of your comments have put a big goofy grin on my face for hours).  
> 


	9. Interlude: Spectrum

This is the moment, Washington thinks, where the change comes to him, where it smashes down his door and rips his life apart. The moment that there is no turning back from, the one that will shake his fractured, yet carefully constructed, _whole_ into pieces once more.

He waits.

It doesn't come.

There is no howling wind or shuddering certainty. There are only three soldiers who were boys not so long ago, frozen in the no-man's-land between the couch and the kitchen counter, with their arms wrapped around each other. The air is filled with silence and sleep and something that _might_ be, that _wants_ to be, that _could_ be- peace.

Wash doesn't know what peace is anymore but he thinks it might be this, standing in the middle of Blue Base with his cheek pressed into Caboose's shoulder and Tucker's dreads tickling the back of his arm. He thinks it might be the ceaseless crashing of the waterfall over grey rocks.

They break apart eventually and drift off, but no one shuts their doors that night. Wash can hear Caboose snoring and Tucker muttering in his sleep, and he thinks that maybe this is peace, too.

Something like steel starts a quiet braid inside of his bones.


	10. 2.1: Azure

When Agent Washington wakes up, it is to the smell of pancakes, of all things.

He only snaps about half of his armor on before curiosity gets the best of him and he peeks out of his already open door into the kitchen. Tucker is indeed standing at the stove making pancakes, with Caboose seated at the breakfast bar watching eagerly. 

"Where the hell did you get pancakes?"

Tucker glances up. "Oh, good. You're awake. No, don't bother putting on the rest of your armor. Sit." He gestures with the spatula at the seat next to Caboose, and Wash sits. "Now. Here's the game plan for today. I am making the game plan because when the leader is injured or needs a day off, the second in command-that's me- gets to call the shots."

Wash frowns. "But I'm not-"

"Oh no. I'm not done. Not even close. Now. Where did I get pancakes, you ask? There was a supply drop this morning. _No, don't you dare run out there to check!_ " Tucker snaps when Wash shows every sign of bolting from his seat. "Caboose and I have already inventoried everything. It's just some food- fresh fruit included, if you can believe it- and toilet paper and shit like that. The Reds got a similar box-"

"But theirs has chocolate," Caboose stage whispers, and Tucker nods.

"It does. Fuckers. But the point is, they just dropped the boxes in the valley from an airship. Everything's fine, no one is coming to check on us, and we've already scouted out the valley. So, nothing for you to worry about, in other words."

Wash startles at that. "You've already walked the perimeter? What time is it?"

"Not late. We just got up early."

"The _Reds_ , too?"

"Yep."

"But why-"

"Moving on from that," Tucker continues loudly, "Back to the game plan. As I was saying, I'm in charge because you are taking a sick day."

"But I'm not sick-" Wash gets in before Tucker interrupts again.

"Mental health day. What the fuck ever. I don't give a shit what you wanna call it, but you're taking one. So here's the itinerary." Tucker pauses to divide the pancakes into three stacks and pushes plates in front of Wash and Caboose. "Step one. We eat. Fruit, too. Balanced meal and all that shit. Step two-" he points the spatula at Wash again "-you tell us what happened that had you all freaked out yesterday. Step three, you get your ass back out of that armor and spend the day sleeping while Caboose and I run shit around here."

"What- I'm not spending the day _sleeping_ -"

"Oh, yes you are," Tucker says grimly, "but let's not worry about that just yet. Step one is eat, remember?"

He pushes a bottle of syrup in front of Wash, who adds a liberal amount to his pancakes before digging in. "Christ, you're gonna go into sugar shock one of these days," Tucker mutters, and they sit in silence for a few moments to devour their pancakes.

"These are good," says Wash, a little surprised. "Huh. You can really cook."

"Fuck yeah I can cook," Tucker says proudly. "Kind of had to learn. Caboose almost blew up our old base once using the stove, and Church would live on ration bars if you let him- which kind of makes sense, seeing that he didn't really need food and all." Tucker tosses an apple to him and Caboose. "Come on, fruit. No coffee, though, since you're going right back to sleep."

"I'm not-"

"So step two," Tucker interrupts loudly. "What the _fuck_ happened yesterday? I walked over to find you standing by yourself with your helmet lying twenty five feet away as if you'd just fucking drop kicked it. Something triggered you, and it looked like it was more than just a memory. If it's something that's gonna affect me and Caboose here, we deserve to know."

"I know," Wash says quickly. "It's not- no one's in danger, or anything like that."

"Okay," says Tucker. "So what gives, then?"

Wash pushes the last few bites of his pancakes around his plate. "It was my old Freelancer channel."

Tucker frowns. "You mean, on the radio?"

"Yeah it's...it's a dead channel, obviously. No one's used it in years. But I...I log into it, sometimes, just to...listen. It's just static. I don't know. It's a habit I got into."

Wash is aware that he sounds like a complete lunatic, a thing he is even more certain of when Caboose starts nodding as if what he said makes perfect sense. Tucker, however, looks a little startled. "Isn't that dangerous? Wouldn't Command be keeping an eye on that channel?"

"No no," Wash reassures him. "It wasn't an authorized frequency. It's one we used when we didn't want Command to hear us- if we had our own ideas about how to accomplish a mission or if...if we were trying to organize a poker tournament in the armory at two in the morning or something." 

Tucker looks even more startled at the thought of Wash partaking in late night poker tournaments on a military ship, but he doesn't draw attention to it. "Okay, so there's this old radio channel that you check in on periodically so you can listen to the static, which is depressing as fuck, but we'll put a pin in that. So what happened?"

"Well, yesterday...there _wasn't_ static." Wash hesitates. "I could hear someone else breathing on the other end of the line. And it wasn't my own breathing, either. There was another person on that channel."

Tucker considers this. "Did they say anything? Did _you_ say anything?"

Wash shakes his head. "No. We just stayed on the line for a minute or so- I think they were just as startled as I was- before I..."

"Before you freaked out and threw your helmet across the clearing. Got it." Tucker takes a bite out of his own apple and chews thoughtfully. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know...the only ones who had the passcode to that old frequency are all...they're all dead. It's impossible that someone else would be on it." He clears his throat. "It's probably nothing."

"Probably," says Tucker, then frowns at Caboose. "Caboose. Eat your goddamn apple. We haven't had fresh fruit in months."

"Yeah, I would rather have chocolate like the Reds," says Caboose disdainfully, rolling his apple from hand to hand.

"We'll go beat it out of them later, okay?" he turns back to Wash. "Thanks for telling us. It doesn't sound like there's anything we can do, or even that we should do. We'll keep an eye out for weird shit as usual and that'll be that. In the meantime, maybe don't log onto that frequency, yeah?"

"I won't," Wash promises. Going onto that old channel is the last thing he feels like doing, although he isn't sure which would be worse: hearing the mysterious breathing, or hearing nothing but static. He still isn't completely convinced that he hadn't made the whole thing up in his head.

"Alright. Onto step three." Tucker snags their dirty plates and dumps them into the sink. "What the fuck is the deal with you and sleeping?"

"What- there's no _deal_ -"

"Oh, there's a deal alright. You haven't been sleeping since that night, have you?" Wash doesn't need to ask which night he means. "And I'm sure your bedtime routine wasn't great before that, was it?"

"My routine is fine," Wash snaps. "I'm getting enough sleep to function-"

Tucker looks at him a little sadly. "Dude, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are not functioning. You're fucking exhausted _all the time_. Not a great combination with the PTSD you've clearly got going on."

Wash tenses, immediately defensive. "I do _not_ have PTSD-"

Tucker holds up a hand. "Relax. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you or anything. You are so fucked up in so many different ways that I wouldn't even know where to begin. Just hear me out, okay?" He waits for Wash to give a curt nod, then continues. "I don't know what happened to you in that Freelancer program, but it was clearly pretty shitty and it's okay that you've got issues from it. We've all got our own issues, here. Trying to pretend you're fine when you're not isn't helping anyone. Not me, not Caboose, and certainly not you. Trying to pretend you're fine and forcing yourself to stay awake is even worse. So." Tucker claps his hands together. " _You're_ spending the day catching up on some sleep."

Wash glances at his bedroom door. "I can't just-"

"Why not? Is it the nightmares? We can wake you up if you're having a bad one. I'll throw shit at you from across the room or something."

Wash almost smiles at that, but it's not enough to quell the weird panic inside his chest. "I'm the leader of this team, and if something happens-"

"Nothing's going to happen. Caboose and I are gonna be keeping an eye out, and so are the Reds. If something happens, we'll wake you." Tucker gives him a half smile. "Don't you think you'll sleep better knowing you've got a team keeping an eye on things?"

Not until Tucker phrases it this way does Wash realize that he hasn't felt safe enough to sleep in a long time. He glances at his room again. "I don't know..."

"Dude, it's fine. Get your ass in there. We'll make sure you're up tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?!"

"Yes!" says Tucker impatiently. "What, you're just gonna sleep through the day and roam around at night? No way. You look like you could use a week's worth of sleep, to be honest, but let's start with a day."

He hesitates until Caboose gives him a little encouraging bump with his shoulder. Wash sighs, says, "okay, okay," and trudges off towards his room.

Tucker laughs. "Dude, you're taking a nap, not heading to the gallows."

Wash glances back at him. "You'll wake me if there's trouble, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, promise." Tucker rolls his eyes. "Go!"

Wash removes his armor and Kevlar undersuit, throws on a pair of sweatpants, and climbs into bed. He leaves the door and the blinds open, and something about the light and the soft noises coming from the kitchen- Caboose's chatter, the clinking of dishes- lures him into a deep sleep the way the silence and the dark never could. 

Washington drifts, but for the first time in years, he does not dream.

***

The raindrops are thick and heavy, striking into the metal base like little silver bullets.

Wash wakes up slowly, easily, rolling onto his back and stretching his arms and legs until he hears a satisfying series of pops down his spine. The grey light suggests that it is morning, and Wash lays there for a few more minutes, marveling at how clear and weightless his head feels. 

The sounds of Caboose and Tucker moving around pulls him into the kitchen, and Caboose brightens when he sees Wash in the doorway. "Church! You're awake!"

Tucker rolls his eyes, but doesn't correct Caboose. "How was it, sleeping beauty?"

"It was...good," says Wash, surprised. "I don't even think I dreamed. Unless...?"

"Nah. At least not that we could tell. Coffee?"

Wash nods and pours himself a cup, adding the usual sugar and prompting another eye roll from Tucker. "So did I really sleep for 24 hours?"

"You sure did," says Tucker. "And no, you didn't miss anything. It was the most boring day ever, actually."

"Thanks," Wash says, and his voice is awkward but genuine. "I guess I did really need that."

"No problem," says Tucker breezily. "Just think of how great it would feel to sleep like that everyday. You ever think about sleeping pills?"

"No," says Wash, a little louder than he intended. Caboose looks up at him anxiously, and he forces the pitch of his voice back down. He hesitates before letting the words go. "No. When I was in recovery at Freelancer, I spent most nights pacing around the infirmary, and when I did sleep, it was...fitful. They prescribed me sleeping pills and...they did make me sleep, but they didn't stop the nightmares and...because of the pills, I couldn't wake up from them." He doesn't mention the utter terror of realizing he was dreaming but being unable to claw his way out of the nightmare, or how this made him unsure if he was sleeping or actually awake. He doesn't mention how they made him sluggish and paranoid and claustrophobic, trapped inside his own unmoving body.

Tucker looks as if he has a fair idea of all these things Wash didn't say, anyway. "That sounds fucking terrifying. How long did they keep you on them?"

"Awhile," says Wash tightly. "They said they were necessary, because I wasn't sleeping without them."

"What the fuck," Tucker mutters. "Okay, so no sleeping pills for you. Got it."

"Anyway..." Wash casts around for a new subject. "What else did we get in the supply drop?"

"Some MREs, ration bars...more sugar, which at the rate you're going, we're actually almost out of...coffee...toilet paper...fruit...pasta...some flour and prepackaged mixes...I mean, Jesus Christ, we were lucky if they gave us enough MREs to last us a month back at Blood Gulch. Why the fuck were the guys at this base living the high life?"

"It is a little weird," muses Wash. "I'd love to know where they got the beer Grif found."

"Well, we used to sneak beer in when one of us was home on leave. Which was, you know. Basically never." Tucker sighs. 

Wash finishes the last bite of his apple and tosses the core into the garbage disposal bin. "Alright, well, I know it's raining, but let's go check the perimeter now."

"Finally!" Caboose bounces up out of his seat and all but runs to the door. "Let's go!"

Wash _stares_ at him. "Are you okay, Caboose?"

"I am great!"

"Caboose, go put your armor on." Tucker stands up and stretches. "Sure, let's go. We gotta go stop by Red Base, anyway."

"We do? Why?"

"It's a surprise, Church!" Caboose yells from inside his bunk. Wash can hear the enthusiastic clanging of armor echoing from the inside. "You'll see!"

"Relax, dude. We're just gonna go hang out for a bit," Tucker says when he sees the apprehensive look on Wash's face.

"Alright...give me a minute, I need to shower..."

Twenty minutes later, the three of them are making their way around the perimeter of the valley. The rain falls fast and heavy against their suits, and the waterfall roars. They can barely hear each other over their helmet microphones, and it isn't long before an envelope blips in the corner of Wash's HUD.

CBS: ARE WE DONE YET  
TKR: does it look like we r done idiot  
CBS: IS THAT A YES  
TKR: we have checked this fuckin valley out every day since arriving how do u not know the route yet  
CBS: BUT WE WILL BE LATE  
WSH: Late for what?! Am I missing something?  
CBS: YES  
TKR: caboose SHUT UP

Ten more minutes of bickering follows before they finally reach the Red Base. Grif is standing outside and smoking a cigarette underneath the overhang. "Fuck this rain," he says, by way of greeting. 

"I like the rain," says Caboose as he removes his helmet. Wash sighs. The constant removal of helmets is a terrible habit of theirs that he's going to have to break eventually, but he lets it go for now.

"You like everything, Caboose." Tucker's voice is exasperated as he removes his helmet as well, dreads spilling out around his shoulders.

Wash takes off his helmet as they walk inside, because what the hell, at this point. "So what is going on? You're all acting really...weird..."

His voice falters as he walks inside to see Sarge and Simmons seated next to a large crate. They've dragged various stools and smaller crates around it in a circle to form a makeshift table, on top of which is an actual cake, candles and all. Wash stops dead in his tracks as he makes out the words written in blocky icing: HAPPY BIRTHDAY WASH

Wash suddenly wishes that he had left his helmet on, because he has no idea what his face is doing. He stares and stares at the cake, frozen until Tucker says, "happy birthday, dude," and slaps him on the shoulder so hard that Wash stumbles forward a step or two

"Well, now we know how to shut up any future Freelancers we're sure to run into," mutters Sarge. "Just bake them a birthday cake!"

"Yeah, there are no more Freelancers," says Caboose. "They're all dead."

"Caboose," hisses Tucker. "Shut it!"

"I don't..." Wash clears his throat, slightly mortified at the strangled note in his voice. "How did you know it was my birthday?"

"You told us, idiot," says Grif. He's wandered inside and is still smoking his cigarette.

"Grif!" snaps Simmons. "No smoking inside the base! It's against the rules!"

"Who cares? These bases are abandoned, anyway."

"You know that smoke upsets my allergies!"

" _Fine_ ," Grif huffs, and he storms back outside.

"Good," grunts Sarge. "Maybe he won't come back."

"Heard that!"

"Good!"

"Um." Wash is having serious deja vu, struck by similarities between being given Epsilon's armor in the snow and this bizarre situation: his confusion and their bickering is markedly similar. "When did I tell you it was my birthday?"

"When the Sarge asked how old you are, and you said, I'll be thirty-three two weeks from today actually, and then he said, good god you're all babies are they recruiting in preschool now and then Tucker said-"

"Yeah, thanks Caboose, we were all there," says Tucker. He's already flopped in a chair with his feet propped up on the crate. "Come on, someone light the candles already, I'm starving."

"But..." Wash is still staring at the cake. "Why did you make me a cake?"

"Because it's your birthday, Church!" says Caboose. "And that means cake!"

"It's kind of a longstanding tradition around here that we make a cake for someone's birthday." Tucker's exuding a considerable amount of energy trying to secure his pile of dreads on top of his head with a hair tie that's far too small. "But this is the first time we've had an actual cake. Usually we have to like, bake a bunch of ration bars together."

Wash looks around at all of them in turn: at Tucker and Sarge, seated around the crate, at the trail of smoke that leads to Grif, at Caboose rummaging through the doors for a lighter, and at the way Simmons is regarding him with his arms crossed.

"But..."

"You owe me five bucks, Simmons," Grif yells from just outside the base, and Simmons grumbles in response.

Wash blinks, then glances around to look at Grif, lurking in the doorway. "For what?"

"Well, I bet Simmons that you were gonna get like, super fucking weird when you walked in and saw that there was a birthday cake waiting for you. And you did. So pay up, Simmons!"

Tucker sighs. "Okay, okay, let's go, light the fucking candles- no no, not you Caboose, give me the lighter, Jesus-" 

He lights the candles as Grif makes his way back into the base. Wash still has no idea what his face looks like as they all sing happy birthday, and it's horribly off key, and Caboose calls him Church, but they're actually _singing happy birthday_ and Wash decides, again, to just go with it.

 _Don't let me fuck this up_ , he wishes when he blows the candles out. He stops Tucker from slicing the cake with his energy sword, and uses his own throwing knife to cut and plate out six slices. 

"You're cutting a cake, not performing open heart surgery," says Grif, peering over Wash's shoulder.

"Stop hovering," Wash says, exasperated, and hands him a plate.

Grif shoves what seems to be half the slice in his mouth and lets out an almost indecent moan. "Dude. This cake is on point."

"I know," says Tucker. "I'm fucking awesome. You should know that by now."

They make their way through the cake and lapse into various conversations and insults, and at one point Wash looks up to see Simmons watching him. He looks more curious than mistrustful, and he says, "you still don't get it, huh?"

Wash pauses with the fork halfway to his mouth. "Get...what?"

"This." Simmons gestures around vaguely at Caboose arm wrestling Sarge, and Tucker trying to bum a cigarette off Grif. "Them. Us. I'm still not sure I agree with their decision, to like, keep you as a pet, or make you the leader of Blue Team or whatever. But you're here now, which means you're a part of...this. And we've got a certain way of doing things around here, and that way includes baking birthday cakes out of ration bars and taking the time to spray paint the killer Freelancer's shoulder pads yellow."

Wash _laughs_ , at that, a real laugh that bursts out of him and is almost startling in its unfamiliarity. Caboose laughs as well, the corners of Simmons' mouth twitch up, and Tucker drops the pack of cigarettes that he wrestled from Grif. "So uh. Get used to it. Okay?"

"Okay," says Wash. "Okay, _okay._ "

"Good," said Simmons, and he reaches behind the crate he's sitting on and pulls out a bottle of whiskey.

Tucker's jaw drops. "Dude! Is that liquor? Where the fuck did you get that?"

"Found it," says Grif casually. "Same cabinet we found the beer in."

"Why aren't we finding any booze at Blue Base? And what the fuck did these old troopers do all day?"

"Not work, apparently! Something they've got in common with all of you!" says Sarge, but he's already got six cups stacked around the crate.

Wash hesitates. "I don't know if we should..."

"Oh, come on, just one shot, it's your birthday, dude..." Tucker pours him a shot and shoves it in his hand.

Tucker's grin is contagious and Wash sighs, and takes the cup from his hand. They have their shot, and then one more, and Wash doesn't know what he expected his thirty-third birthday to hold, but it wasn't cake and whiskey in a Simulation Outpost. He thinks, secretly, that he wouldn't trade it for the world, and the steel braid in his bones weaves itself a little tighter.


	11. 2.2: Cerulean

Wash can't exactly call his time at Rockslide a _vacation_ , but it might be the closest thing he's had to one in a long, long time. 

A few weeks after his birthday, he is sitting outside Blue Base- keeping watch, he calls it, but it's really more like relaxing in the sunshine if he's being honest- and thinks about Doc's supposed theory. Has it really been so long since he's felt normal? Freelancer wasn't that many years ago, but his previous military experience was no picnic either. Even his years on Earth before he became a soldier were filled with uncertainty and tension. It seems as if all he's done is fight and fight and fight, and now-

Wash isn't exactly sure what he's doing now, but he knows that it can't possibly last. He still jolts awake from nightmares, and there's a few layers of awkwardness left between him and the rest of the Blood Gulch gang- but his sleep hasn't been quite so fitful, and when he looks at the Reds and Blues, he sees his team. He isn't sure if they will fight as one when the time comes, but when he remembers Sidewinder, he thinks it might happen naturally after all. 

So: yes, better.

For now, _better_ is enough. 

An hour or so goes by before Wash stands and makes his way back inside. It's almost lunchtime, which means MREs, unless Tucker has decided to make something more edible. He'd banned Wash from the kitchen last week after he'd somehow managed to violently implode an MRE in the microwave. "For fuck's sake, what would you and Caboose eat without me? You know what, don't answer that, I don't wanna know..."

To his surprise, the kitchen is empty. A quick scope of Blue Base proves that Tucker and Caboose are nowhere to be found. 

A quiet sort of unease starts to build in his gut. _They're fine_ , he tells himself. _They're just doing their mid-morning perimeter check._

Except for the part where no one ever did any sort of perimeter check unless Wash was dragging them out the door to do it. He paces, sends a message on his HUD, and waits.

WSH: Where are you guys?

He never does get a message back. What he _does_ get is a _blipblipblip_ signaling that their shared Tango815 channel is active, and he opens it to the sound of absolute mayhem.

"-do you _mean_ you forgot we had a shared channel?!"

"I'm a _little busy_ over here, Tucker, if you haven't-" the rest of Simmons' sentence is drowned out in a volley of rapid fire machine gun rounds, and Wash is off and running towards Red Base before his mind has caught up with the situation. The hard, cold certainty that always precedes a battle settles in his bones, and as he runs, he listens, resisting the urge to clog the up the radio with the dozens of questions flitting across his brain. 

"Where the fuck did this guy _come_ from?" That's Simmons again, his voice high and anxious but also angry. "Some watch you were keeping, _Grif_ -"

"Hey, it's not my fault! Did you see that crazy shit he did with his armor?"

"Will someone cover Caboose? Jesus fucking _Christ_ -" Tucker this time.

"Looks to me like he's got the situation pretty well under control!" Sarge, in between shotgun blasts. "Look at him go!"

Wash can't take it anymore. "Tucker. What's going on?"

"Oh good, Wash! Get the fuck over here, we're fighting some asshole in black armor and-"

"Where's _here?_ Red Base?"

"Yes, we're at Red Base-" there's the sound of Tucker's plasma sword slicing through something, then a yelp, then a moment of heart-stopping silence before Tucker continues, " _jst get over here!_ "

"How many are there?"

"Just one..."

There's a loud crash, followed by more gunfire and cursing from everyone. " _Just one?_ "

"Yeah, and we're getting completely fucked up!"

He can see Red Base now. "Alright. Lead the attacker away from the door, and I'm going take him from behind-"

"Bowchickabowwow-"

_"Tucker-"_

"Alright, alright, fine, lead the crazy fuck away from the door, got it..." Tucker's sword hums again. "Hey! Over here, you cockbite!"

There's a truly spectacular crash, followed by a lot of confused yelling and cursing, and by the time Wash skids to a halt in front of the base, the scene has degenerated into complete chaos. He presses his back to the wall and quickly peeks in to make sure there isn't a rifle in his face. There is indeed a black armored attacker, but he or she is half crouched and swaying, surrounded by pieces of a wooden crate and, randomly, candy bars. Little fires are sprung up around the room, and the couch is completely engulfed in flames, but he can't see any immediate dangers to unveiling his presence. 

Wash spins into the room, levels his rifle at the attacker, and says, "freeze," somewhat unnecessarily. The black-armored soldier glances up sharply at the sound of Wash's voice. "Hands where I can see them. _Now._ "

Slowly, their attacker raises their arms above their head, and Wash takes a quick inventory of the situation in his peripheral vision. Grif and Simmons are crouched behind the burning couch, and Sarge is lying on top of the cabinets- Wash has no idea how he got up there in power armor- with his shotgun at the ready. Tucker is standing on top of the table with his sword raised, and Caboose is edging over towards the fallen candy bars that surround the newcomer. It is nothing short of ridiculous, but the newcomer is clearly woozy, and the Reds and Blues all seem relatively unhurt. Wash feels something warm beneath his breastbone, and it takes him a moment to name the feeling and call it pride.

"Caboose, stay where you are," Tucker says sharply, and Caboose sighs as he edges back a bit.

They all turn as there's a loud clatter from near the ceiling. Sarge clambers down ungracefully from his perch on top of the cabinets. "I never thought I'd say this, but..." he lowers his shotgun and, to the complete and utter confusion of everyone present, shakes Caboose's hand. "Thank you, Blue."

"You're welcome," says Caboose, cheerful as always. "Um. What did I do?"

"Why, you saved us!" says Sarge, still wringing Caboose's hand as if he's just found the solution to intergalactic peace. "Came in the nick of time! Thank goodness you heard our distress call-"

Tucker groans, exasperated. "We didn't hear your distress call, idiot, he was on his way to _steal your chocolate_ and I was on my way to _kick his ass_ -"

"Don't be modest, Private Tucker. I know what a rescue mission looks like, and that was one of the finest executed I've ever seen." Sarge turns to Tucker and, just as solemnly, shakes his hand as well. "I hate to say it, but Red Team is in your debt."

Simmons sputters indignantly. "For _what_? Showing up here and nearly getting us all killed?"

"Well, if you two hadn't done such a piss poor job of defending our noble base, we wouldn't have needed rescue!"

"Hey, I was single _handedly_ saving the day while you took ten fucking minutes to get your old ass in the ceiling, and Simmons was off dicking around in the storage closet." Grif's tone turns sulky. "I _still_ say we could've defended the 'noble base' without lighting our _entire liquor supply on fire_."

"Alright, alright," says Wash when Simmons starts to mutter a retort. His gaze is still fixed on the black armored attacker, who is now sitting cross-legged amongst the falling candy bars and staring at the Reds and Blues. Their face is covered, but Wash has a hunch that the expression is similar to the one he himself first wore when being subjected to the troopers' antics. "Well. That was a bit...unconventional, but we'll call it a win."

"We do what we can," says Tucker.

Wash jerks his rifle in the direction of the newcomer. "You. Who are you?"

The soldier slowly turns, but doesn't answer, just looks at him a way that makes the hair on the back of Wash's neck stand up. "I said, _who are you?_ "

The stare continues, and there's something about it that's piercing, unnerving, and-

Their attacker holds his gaze and Wash blinks a bit as something funny happens to the armor. At first, he thinks he imagined it, but no, the black is _fading_ , turning from coal to midnight to teal-

Piercing, unnerving, and _familiar._

"Hey, Wash."

Wash does not drop his battle rifle. He does not drop it, because he has _never_ dropped it; this is why he was recruited for Freelancer, his skill with that rifle and his ability to hit a bull's eye while free falling through the air. But he does fumble it in his hands, a bit, in a way that would be unnoticeable to an outsider, but to Wash, it feels as if he just chucked it off the side of a cliff. 

Because this is _impossible._

There is no way that this soldier can be in front of him; she is dead, she is gone, she is KIA (but so are _you_ , Agent Washington), and he is the only one left.

But he thinks of a quiet breath, and SierraNovember99, and-

_"Carolina?"_

Later, Wash will remember that his very first, raw emotion at seeing her again after so long was joy. It bursts in his chest, a wild thing that wants to lift her up in a hug and spin her around and laugh and say, _you're alive, you're alive, you're alive-_

But there's something else building inside of him, something that's turning the joy into shock and confusion and a little bit of anger and what he says instead is, "I don't understand."

His voice sounds very far away to his own ears, and when Tucker mutters, "yeah, that makes six of us who are confused as fuck," the sound filters slowly through to his ears, as if he is underwater.

Carolina is watching him as she climbs to her feet- slowly, as there are still six weapons trained on her- and Wash looks back, taking in the sharp lines of her helmet, the curves of her favorite pistols. He wonders if her face is the same. If her hair is still long. If her laugh is still as loud-

He realizes that the Reds and Blues are looking at him somewhat expectantly, waiting for him to take charge of the situation. He knows he should, knows that there are answers he needs but he can't quite remember the proper _questions_ , can't quite-can't quite-

"Soooo," says Grif, still crouched down behind the ridiculous burning couch. "How do you two know each other?"

"Freelancer," says Carolina shortly, and the tension in the room instantly spikes as everyone grips their weapons a little more firmly. 

"You're a _Freelancer?_ " roars Sarge at the same time that Simmons mutters, "great, just fucking great-" and Carolina's kind of staring at them all with that confused tilt to her helmet again, and Wash knows that tilt because it was the same one she'd give her old teammates when they were behaving like children and-

 _Stay here._ Wash gives himself a little shake. Transfers his rifle to his left side. Anchors his thoughts firmly in the present. 

"Well, Washington," Carolina's looking at him again. "This is the last place I expected to find you."

"Why are you..." he trails off, clears his throat. Switches his gun back to the other hand. "Why are you here?"

Carolina cuts to the chase, as always. "I think I have a way to take down Freelancer."

Wash just kind of shakes his head at her and turns away, gripping his rifle as if it's the only solid thing left in the world. There's an anxious knot in his stomach, although he doesn't know why it's there, doesn't know why he's feeling so defensive and aggressive all at once, and when Carolina says, "I need you to help me do it," the knot just gets worse.

A little envelope pops up on Wash's HUD, and he opens it to see a message from Tucker.

TKR: want me 2 go all swish swish stab on her ass

Wash shakes his head again, at Tucker this time, although he doesn't know exactly what he's trying to convey. Tucker lifts a shoulder and tilts his own head to the side, and before Wash can finish interpreting what exactly that means, someone clears their throat loudly. 

"Um," says Grif. "I don't know if this is like, a negotiation, or a heart to heart, or what, but seeing as how this base is about to fall down on top of us, might I suggest moving the conversation elsewhere?"

"That's a good idea," says Tucker. "We can all sit down and have some coffee at our base, and-"

"We aren't going to Blue Base!" 

"You have _coffee_ at Blue Base?!"

Tucker glares at Sarge and Simmons, respectively. "Guys-"

The walk over to Blue Base is quite possibly the longest, and most awkward, of Wash's life. The seven of them stomp along in complete silence, with everyone spread out and trying to keep an eye on each other without _looking_ as if they are trying to keep an eye on each other. Wash focuses on not tripping, on not dropping his battle rifle, on not letting his thoughts scatter to the wind. He stares and stares at the back of Carolina's helmet and wonders, suddenly, if he is awake, if this is really happening. Carolina enters the base first, with Wash not far behind her and Tucker not far behind him. The Reds and Caboose have faltered at the door, whispering furiously to each other. 

Tucker strolls past Carolina without even looking at her, and gets the coffee pot on. She does a double take. "You were serious, about the coffee." 

"Fuck yeah I was serious about the coffee," says Tucker. "You all need to _chill._ Coffee is good for chilling. I mean, alcohol is better, but we have to work with what we got." He turns to Carolina, leaning against the counter. "So, like. Who the fuck are you?"

Wash sighs, and something about Tucker's brash response makes the words come a little easier. "Tucker-"

"No, I'm sorry, this is fucking bullshit. Are you kidding me? How is it possible that we've gotten into it with _this many goddamn Freelancers?_ "

"Tucker," Wash says again, but lower, this time. Tucker glares at him. "Can you give us a minute?"

"You're joking, right? I'm not leaving you in here alone with her, we have no idea what she wants-"

"That's what I'm going to find out." He takes a deep breath. "Tucker. Go. And keep an eye on Caboose. And don't let the Reds do anything stupid."

They glare at each other for a long moment until Tucker relents. "Fine. _Five minutes_."

He sweeps out of the room, and then it's just Wash and Carolina. They look at each other. The coffeepot burbles. Wash grabs onto the handle with his free hand, turning it back and forth a little.

"Carolina. How are you...what are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same question, Agent Washington," and there's something almost mocking in her voice that he doesn't like, not one bit. "I thought you were dead. Your _file_ says that you're dead. Instead, you're hiding out in a Simulation Base with these...these troopers?"

Wash would like to ask- among other things- how she had access to his file, but what he says is, "you thought I was dead?" and his voice climbs up an octave or two. " _You_ thought _I_ was dead?"

"Look-"

"Tell me what you want, Carolina," and the way his voice has gone cold and flat seems to give her pause, but not for long. She gets to the point.

"I want to kill the Director, and I think I've found a way to do it."

Wash says, "Okay."

"Okay? _Okay?_ That's all you have to say?"

He breathes. Lets go of the coffeepot. Spins his rifle, hand over hand. "Do you want me to help you? Do you want my opinion? Tell me what you _want_. Tell me the _plan._ "

Carolina tilts her head at him a little, but all she says is, "Epsilon."

"Epsilon," Wash repeats, somewhat numbly.

"He'll know where the Director will be," she continues. "He has Alpha's memories."

"Oh, _does_ he?" He isn't shaking, not yet, but he can feel a rattle deep inside his bones, and he clenches his rifle a little tighter.

"Wash-"

"So, Epsilon," continues Wash, because he can't, _he can't_ , he can't do this with her, not now, and maybe not ever. "You are aware, I'm sure, that he is locked in the UNSC archives? The _heavily guarded_ UNSC archives?"

"I'm aware." Carolina pauses, straightens her spine. "That's where you come in."

"Where I come in and do what?"

"I know where the facility is, and I know how to get in, but...it's not a one person job. I need a whole squadron. I've been looking for you because..." she pauses. "Because we're the only ones left, now. We're the only ones left from Freelancer, and it's our responsibility to _end it_."

"Our responsibility," he echoes, and the word crashes around in his skull. "Just ours?"

"Well," she says slowly. "These Simulation Troopers seem to...listen to you. What are you, their leader or something?"

Something in Carolina's tone gets his back up. "Or something."

"Mmm hmmm," she says, eyeing him critically. "Well, it seems as if we have a team ready made, then-"

Wash finds himself nodding along, at first- this he can do, it's familiar, there's a mission to complete, with Carolina at the head and a team at his back, and he actually glances up at the door as if expecting York to walk through-

but there is no York, no glinting gold armor, just a flash of regulation blue from where Caboose's elbow shifts into view, because of _course_ his team his eavesdropping at the door-

his team, his team-

there's something akin to a car crash happening inside of his head, thoughts screeching to a halt, and the world is suddenly bright and clear; the underwater feeling is gone and his head breaks the surface like coming up for air and he slams his rifle on the table, _hard_ , and says, "Carolina, what the _fuck?_ "

It's so sudden, so unlike the Wash she last knew, that it seems his words actually render her momentarily speechless. She glances from Wash's face, to his rifle, to his face again. "Excuse me?"

"What the fuck is going on? How are you here? I thought you were dead. _I thought you were dead!_ I don't- what is-"

"Wash-"

"No. _No._ " He snatches his rifle from the breakfast bar, and starts to pace. He dimly hears the Reds and Blues hastily retreat further outside of the base, but couldn't care less if they overhear. In this moment, he couldn't care less if the whole world overhears. "Last I heard, the Meta threw you off a cliff after he took your A.I. He killed you! You were supposed to be dead-"

"So were you-"

"Carolina! Stop! What's going on? _Tell me what's going on!_ "

" _Okay_." She blows out a frustrated sigh, and he can almost see the red fringe flying up off of her forehead. "The short version? I used my grappling hook to stop the fall. I left. I laid low. I gathered all of the intel I could on Freelancer. I've been keeping tabs on everything to do with the project, and now, I know how to take it down-"

He stops pacing so suddenly that her words falter. "Say that again."

"Say...what again?"

"Say....what you just said about Freelancer. Say. It. Again."

For whatever reason, she does.. "I...gathered all the intel I could on Freelancer...I've been keeping tabs on the project and I know how to take it down."

He's moving again, turning his rifle over and over in his hands, striding across the tiny room that's _just not big enough_. "You've been keeping tabs on _everything to do with the project_. Does that include me?"

"I..." she pauses. "It does."

"You knew I was alive," he says, and the underwater feeling is back. "Didn't you?"

To her credit, she does not lie. "Yes."

"How long?"

"Years."

It's the answer he expected, but it stuns him into stillness once more. " _Years?_ " he asks, and he hates the vulnerability that creeps into his voice, hates the hurt the he can feel all over his face, despite the fact that she cannot see it. "Carolina, you knew I was alive for _years?_ But I- how could you let me think that you were dead?"

"Because it didn't matter, Wash!"

"It didn't _matter?_ " She remains silent, and nothing changes in her posture, but Wash can see the moment that she resigns herself, steels herself for whatever he is about to say. He recognizes it immediately, because it was the same sort of resignation etched into every line of his own body when he knew Tucker was about to demand answers all those weeks ago. "It didn't matter? But it matters now? When you need my help? Because you have no one better to help you?"

"It isn't like that-" she protests angrily, seemingly unable to help herself, but he overrides her.

"Let me tell you when it should have mattered," he spits. "It should have mattered when I was losing my mind in that infirmary, when none of you bothered to turn on your goddamn _radio_. It should have mattered when they interrogated me for months after, had me drugged up so fucking badly I didn't know my own name. Or what about when I was a Recovery Agent, out in the field, tracking down our old team? Where were you? Where the fuck were you when South shot me? When I was in prison? When I thought I was the only one left? Where was my old fearless team leader then?"

He's dimly aware of the fact that he's shouting, and she lets him, waits for him to fall silent and turn away, and when he does, her voice comes low and angry. "We _all_ had scars from Freelancer, Wash.

He whirls back around. "You think I don't know that? You think I haven't had all the time in the world to think about that? Knowing the things that I do? Christ, all I wanted was to take down Freelancer! I tried after I was cleared for active duty! If you had reached out to me- I would've helped you, Carolina! We could've been working together all this time, but instead...instead, you chose not to trust me."

"I didn't think I could trust anyone," she says. "I mean it, Wash! One of our old teammates tried to kill me! I didn't know what was going on, I didn't know what to _think_ , I..."

She trails off, and they both breathe, the sounds heavy and stuttered, both trying not to look at each other, both drinking in the others' precense.

"Is anyone else alive?" She doesn't answer, but it's all the confirmation he needs. He shakes his head bitterly. "Well. I guess it really is just you and me, then."

"Wash." There's something in her voice that, had it come from anyone else, Wash would describe as pleading. "We have to do this. We have to get justice for...for ourselves, and for our old team."

Wash sighs, a long, lingering sound that seems to go on and on. "I've been down this road before, Carolina, and I'm not so sure I like where it led."

"Can't say I blame you," she retorts, and her voice is all ice. "Stuck in a back world base with some Simulation Troopers."

Wash grits his teeth. "That's not what I meant."

"Then why don't you tell me what you did mean?"

"I mean that...for years, all I wanted was revenge. I thought it would bring me...closure. Or something. It didn't. What it _did_ get me was a lengthy stint in a jail cell, and a lot of time to mull over everything that I regret, which, at this point, is a pretty long list."

Carolina turns away from him, and the action is somehow so dismissive that he wants to wrench her back around. So he does, giving in to the weird recklessness creeping over him, fully aware that she could lay him out and not caring in the slightest. He's almost disappointed when she doesn't hit him, just jerks her arm out of his grasp. "Well. Just because you couldn't complete your mission, Washington, doesn't mean that I can't."

"There's no leaderboard anymore, Carolina," he says, and _there_ she is, slamming her palms into his chest so hard that it sends him back a few paces. She follows him, grabbing his shoulder and bringing her helmet within inches of his own.

"Don't talk to me about that leaderboard," she says, her voice low and venomous.

"Then don't talk to _me_ about the Simulation Troopers."

They glare at each other until she releases his arm and turns away. Wash is torn between wanting to storm off and never look back, and wanting to start this whole conversation over. How many hours had he spent imagining what he would say if he could see one of his old teammates again? And now, here was Carolina- Carolina who'd saved his life more times than he could count, Carolina who use to ruffle his hair and call him little brother, Carolina who he'd once gotten drunk with on a bottle of cheap gin after a mission had gone bad and they'd lost Agent Arkansas- and instead of embracing and laughing and catching up on lost time, they were about to tear each other to pieces.

"And, for the record?" Wash continues after a long stretch of bitter silence. "We're _not_ the only ones left from Freelancer. These Red and Blue soldiers lost just as much from the project as we have. Freelancer used them. _We_ used them. All of them."

She regards him. "They're your team, then? These Simulation Troopers?"

"Yeah. They are."

"And they'll follow you, if you come with me?"

Which is exactly when Caboose wanders in as if he isn't quite sure how get got there. He literally jumps when he sees Carolina and Wash standing there. "Oh! Church! And Agent Colorado!"

"Oh, Caboose, there you are," says Tucker, strolling nonchalantly into the base. "Whoops. Forgot I was supposed to be watching him. Sorry."

It could not be clearer that Tucker is the farthest thing from sorry, and he shrugs when Carolina turns her glare on him. "Look, it's been a long fucking morning, and since Simmons destroyed our liquor supply, coffee is the next best thing."

There is little to no urgency in his movements as he pulls out several coffee mugs. "You gonna explain to us what the fuck is going on now?"

"I will give you information when I feel that it's necessary," snaps Carolina. "And right now, it is not necessary."

Tucker's still rummaging somewhat automatically in their cupboards until he finds the sugar bowl, and he slams it in front of Wash without a word. "Well, excuuuuuse us, but you're gonna have to do a little better than _that_."

Carolina is radiating pure, unfiltered impatience. " _You_ are not the one who I will be offering my explanation to, Private. Washington, can't you get your squad under control?"

But Wash is staring at the sugar bowl. 

It is strangely heavy against his palms, and he cradles it almost reverently, trying to figure out just what's so important about this thick glass bowl and it's snowy, sweet filling. A sudden wave of fondness for Tucker crashes over him, and he tries to dissect it, to put the _why_ of it into words, and all he comes up with is this: Wash's family was lost to him years ago, his friends are long gone, and his new team is still learning how to trust him-

but he _does_ , apparently, have someone who knows how he takes his coffee. 

"Carolina," he says, "get out."

"What?" The word falls from her mouth like a stone.

"I said, get out. I need a few minutes to discuss this with my men." He's not sure who looks more shocked, Carolina or Tucker, the latter of whom has almost dropped his coffee mug. 

"Washington," Carolina says, and now her voice is all growls and grit teeth, "You do not have all the information- I should be here to help the team understand the gravity of-"

"They're not _the_ team. They're not _your_ team. They're _my_ team. _I_ will impress upon them the _gravity_ of the situation. _Get. Out._ "

He does not yell, or rise from his chair, but Carolina stills all the same. Her eyes bore into the side of his head and in his peripheral, he sees her helmet tilt in a considering sort of way before she turns on her heel and glides out of the room.

"I need you guys in here, too," Wash calls, and the Reds skulk into the kitchen area. 

Sarge is taking little half steps, inside the base, looking for all intents and purposes as if he's walking to his death. "Never in my life," he mutters, "did I think I'd set foot in a _Blue Base._ "

"Yeah, well, first time for everything," says Simmons. "What! Hold on! You guys really do have coffee?!"

"Hey, you guys have booze, so don't start with me," says Tucker, who's already got his helmet off and is combing a hand through his tangled dreads.

Wash winces. "Tucker, for god's sake, put your helmet back on-"

"What? She's not gonna kill us." He pauses. " _Is_ she gonna kill us?"

Grif snorts. "Uh, seriously? Isn't that what she was just trying to do?"

Wash watches them all in turn, focusing on the little differences in their armored bodies: the proud lift of Sarge's shoulders, Caboose's constant fidgeting, the occasional tilt of Simmons' head to the left. Little details that he did not notice at first, that no one would notice at first, but that he's come to recognize over the past month. His hands are still holding tight to the sugar bowl, and he suddenly feels as off balanced and dizzy as he did when he raised his bloody palms to the sky back on Sidewinder. He looks again at the sugar bowl. Thinks of fluffy pancakes, and strong coffee, and birthday cake with chocolate frosting. 

Something falls into place.

 _Right_ , he thinks. _Food. Okay. Right._

His hands have caught on faster than his brain and are moving without any conscious instruction, placing his helmet on the countertop and pulling every mug he can find from the cupboards. There aren't quit enough, so he grabs the thick cardboard cups with lids as well. Wash snags the coffeepot from its patient perch and gets to work, setting a mug of black coffee in front of Tucker straight off and cutting a cup in half with hot water for Caboose. He pauses for a moment and does some clever guesswork: Grif's like his, with way too much sugar plus enough creamer to make the coffee nearly white, Simmons' with half a teaspoon of synthesized sweetener. He squints at the cup of black coffee he's just poured for Sarge, turns so that no one can see what he's doing, and discretely adds a little cream and sugar before snapping the lid on the cardboard carrier.

Silence rings.

Wash pushes each cup in front of its intended recipient, clears his throat, says, "coffee is good for...chilling."

The moment hangs heavy in the air for several seconds until, miraculously, every single one of them reaches for their drink without comment. Wash wraps his hands around his own coffee and pretends that he can feel the warmth through his gloves. "So what happened? She just...showed up at Red Base and attacked you all?"

Simmons coughs. "More or less."

Wash idly turns his mug in counterclockwise circles, but speech has gotten easier. "What does _more or less_ mean?"

"It means," says Sarge, who has retreated back to the center of the room after grabbing his coffee, refusing to touch anything else or make himself more comfortable, "that Miss Fussypants strolled in and starting making demands that we refused to meet, and negotiations turned hostile."

Wash rubs a hand over his face. "Sarge. Use your words. What kind of demands?"

"She wanted to know where you were," says Grif nonchalantly. He's also got his helmet off and is digging into an MRE. "We told her to fuck off," he adds once his mouth is sufficiently full of food.

Wash kind of blinks, at that. "You did?"

"We thought she was from the UNSC, and they'd figured out that we'd swapped the bodies." Simmons shrugs. "Kind of surprised they _haven't_ figured that out, to be honest. So anyway, we uh...opened fire on her."

"And you _weren't_ all killed?"

Sarge eyes him shrewdly. "I think it's about time you took that tone of surprise out of your voice, Agent Washington. Or do you want a bulleted list of all the Freelancers we've made short work of? Yourself included, I might add."

"I know, I know, it's just...if you knew Carolina..." he refocuses. "Anyway. Then what happened?"

"Blue Team came to the rescue." Sarge shakes his head in wonder. "Still can't believe I'm saying that, but it's true."

"Sarge, we _didn't come to the rescue._ " Tucker looks at Wash. "These idiots _thought_ they'd broadcasted on our shared channel, but they _didn't have their radios on_. Caboose was sneaking over there to steal some chocolate, and I was following him because we had to like, check the perimeter, you know?"

"Right," says Wash dryly. "More like, you were looking for any excuse to _not_ check the perimeter, and following Caboose was the best thing you could come up with."

"Whatever. Anyway, we arrived in the middle of this ridiculous battle, Caboose dropped a crate of candy bars on the Freelancer chick, and then you showed up." 

"I never got any candy bars," Caboose says mournfully.

"Yeah, neither did we, idiot," mutters Grif. "Since now they're all melted. Thanks."

"Your turn," says Tucker. "Why is she here?"

Wash spins the coffee mug between his hands again, clockwise this time. "Carolina and I were on the same team during Freelancer. I thought she was dead. She's been laying low all of these years, waiting for a chance to take down the Director and now, she has a way to do it." He looks at each of them, in turn. "She's planning to use Epsilon's memories. Which means, step one of her plan is to break Epsilon out of the UNSC Archives. Step two is to find the Director."

"And step three?"

"Kill him, and destroy anything else that's left of Project Freelancer."

Something changes in the room at those words: Tucker lowers his coffee, Grif stops midchew, and Sarge folds his arms over his chest. 

"So, what?" says Tucker says aggressively. "You gonna take off with her?"

"I don't know. I wanted all of your thoughts."

"Thoughts on what?"

"On...this." Wash gestures vaguely. "If it's a good idea. If you want to do it. Or if you want to say fuck it and stay here."

"Uh, why would you want our thoughts on that?" Simmons asks.

There's a strange reverse sense of deja vu going on: this time, the Reds and Blues are staring blankly at him and each other, and Wash is the one waiting for them to catch on. "Because....uh. We're a team." He steels himself. "Because I'm not going without you guys, and if _you_ don't want to go, then _I'm_ not going."

He kind of wishes, for once, that they all had their helmets off, so he could see the looks on their faces. As it is, he can only watch Grif's mouth drop open and Tucker's eyes go wide, before the corners of his mouth twitch into what wants to be a smile. Wash rallies. "This isn't...this isn't just our fight. Carolina's and mine. We both have scars from Freelancer, but so do all of you. Freelancer played games for years. This is your fight, too and...and I...well. I want you to decide."

Wash fidgets for a moment, suddenly aware that his face must be doing all sorts of things. _Right. Food. Okay, right._ He makes himself busy again. Tucker banned him from the stove top four days ago, so he pulls out a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and jelly. He dumps out the bread, divides up the slices, and gets to work making sandwiches, each one different. Ninety percent peanut butter, ten percent jelly. Even, fifty fifty. Peanut butter on both sides, jelly in the middle.

He can hear them whispering.

"Did we break him with the cake?" Grif mutters.

Tucker waves him off. "Nah, he's just socially awkward. Go with it."

Wash nods because it's mostly true, that. Well, all true. He continues. Three quarters jelly, one quarter peanut butter. Sliced corner to corner, four triangles. All peanut butter, four perfect squares, crusts cut off. He pushes this last one in front of Caboose, who lets out a delighted whisper of, "how did he KNOW?"

Satisfied, Wash sits down and pulls the sugar bowl in front of him again, and waits for their decision. Something about the heaviness of the glass lets him know he is making the right call.

"I want to go, Agent Washington," says Caboose, and they all stare at him in surprise. He looks fondly at his sandwich before meeting Wash's gaze. "I want to go rescue Church like the lady said we could."

"Okay, yeah, let's start with _that_ ," says Simmons. "That memory unit was _fucked._ I saw it. Church went in and the lights went out. What if we get all the way into these Archives- assuming we don't die along the way, of course- and we find that the memory unit is just a hunk of junk?"

"It won't be," says Caboose, with all the confidence in the world.

"You don't _know_ that, Caboose," says Simmons, but Caboose is undeterred.

"I know that Church will be there," he says serenely. "We will get the box open, and he will come out. He is alive."

"Okay, great, we know where Caboose stands on the whole thing," says Tucker, exasperated. "Next?"

"I'm coming with you, Caboose," says Sarge, and he actually moves to stand next to Caboose. "I'm not so sure that this _is_ our fight, but you saved our lives, and Red Team never leaves a debt unpaid."

"Ummmm," Grif exchanges a glance with Simmons. "When you say _Red Team_ -"

"I mean that we're all going, Grif! You, me, Simmons and the Warthog-"

"What Warthog-"

"We'll help you get your Blue buddy back, Caboose," Sarge continues loudly. "And then we'll be square."

Tucker rolls his eyes. "Wonderful. Glad we have that all sorted out." He turns to Wash, and the look is long and searching. "Do _you_ want to do this?"

"Like I said, this decision is yours-"

"I know what you _said_. I wanna know what you _think_. Is this important?"

Wash thinks about it, really thinks. He can't remember a point in his life in which he wasn't searching for revenge, and it has left him exhausted and unhappy and with more baggage than he thinks he can carry. Freelancer is personal, but it isn't just about him- it's about Carolina, and Maine, and the Dakota twins, and the Reds and Blues. "It might be. It doesn't seem...right, to let them get away with it. To give them a chance to start new experiments, and hurt people. And..." he clears his throat. "If nothing else, I want to help you guys get Epsilon back. For the right reasons, this time. It's my fault he's stuck in that capture unit in the first place."

"True," says Tucker, but he's half smiling. He glances around at everyone. "Alright, so, we doing this thing?"

"You're in?" asks Wash, and he too looks around the room. "All of you?"

They glance around at each other, all helmet tilts and shrugs, and Wash watches their silent conversation and lets them decide for themselves. 

"Yeah, why the hell not," says Tucker. "Staying in this base is gonna get old sometime, anyway."

"We are about due for some Blue Team bullshit," says Grif. "I think it's been, what, five minutes since our last adventure?"

"Vacation's over," Wash adds, and they _laugh_ a little. He commits the sound to memory, and pockets it for later. He thinks he may need it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *falls on the floor*
> 
> This chapter was almost the death of me. I hope I have done it the justice it deserves.


	12. 2.3: Teal

Wash finds Carolina standing by the waterfall about a hundred feet or so from Blue Base, the late afternoon sun painting her armor a ruby red. She doesn't turn as he approaches, and they stand there for awhile, watching the water rage against the rocks.

"Yes," Wash says finally.

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, we'll come with you. All of us."

Carolina glances at him then, and when she speaks, her tone is sour. "Don't do me any favors, Wash."

"Carolina-"

"If you're all content to stay here and play war in your little bases-"

" _Carolina,_ " he says again, sharper this time, and she falls silent. "Stop. I said we're coming with you, and we're coming."

"Why?"

"They want their friend back. Epsilon," he says, when she slants a confused look at him. "Who, you should know, they call Church. He calls himself Church too, or so I'm told. Just so you're not...caught off guard."

"And why would I be caught off guard, Wash?"

 _Because that was your surname and it would probably be a little weird for you to hear it unexpectedly._ "Church was their friend," he says instead. "He was the leader of Blue Team for a long time, if you can believe that."

Carolina's looking at him full on, now. "What does that mean for you? If you're the new leader, and they get their old leader back- what happens to you?"

She still can't seem to say the word "leader" without a sarcastic lilt to her voice, but Wash chooses to ignore it, for now. "I don't know," he says calmly. "I suppose that's up to them."

"But you're going to help them anyway."

"Yep."

He leaves it at that, and eventually Carolina turns away. "I think they want some sort of justice, too," he says after awhile. "I think they want to make things right, even if they don't know it themselves."

"You're still not telling me what you want, Wash."

"I want..." Yet he is no closer to having a concrete answer to that question. "I don't know, Carolina. I want to fix things. That's it."

There is more to be said, he knows. More conversations they need to have, more history they need to sift through, but Wash doesn't think that either of them can do it just yet.

They turn as one and make their way back to Blue Base. There's something familiar in the silence that makes him think that this might be- not okay, exactly, but maybe not as bad as he was starting to fear.

This happy thought is immediately quashed as they enter the base and find six borderline hostile helmets turned towards them.

Well, five borderline hostile helmets. Caboose noticeably perks up when they walk in. "Oh! Are we going to find Church now?"

"Yes, we are," says Carolina. "I want everyone ready to go in ten minutes."

A resounding silence meets her words. Wash closes his eyes briefly in anticipation.

Sure enough, the Reds and Blues start snickering loudly. "That was a good one, lil' lady," says Sarge. "Leave in ten minutes!"

"What did you just call me-"

"Unless you somehow fucking teleported into this valley, you may have noticed that the walls are made of very unstable rocks," says Tucker. "It's almost dark out and we're never gonna find that path at night, and even if we did, it would be stupid to drive up it now."

"Plus we need to make sure the Warthogs are in working order," adds Sarge.

"Okay, seriously, _what Warthogs?_ " asks Grif.

"The Warthogs at our base Grif," says Simmons in exasperation. "How have you not noticed them before?"

Wash listens to them bicker until he can no longer pretend he doesn't notice Carolina glaring at him. "Look, there's no point in leaving tonight. It's going to be dark soon and I think we could all use some time to process this. We'll head out first thing in the morning."

Carolina continues to glower but doesn't argue. He takes this to mean that she has at least reluctantly agreed to his suggestion.

It isn't long before the Reds slink off to their base- "uh, wasn't it on _fire_ when we left?" Tucker asks, to which Grif shrugs and Sarge tells him not to worry about it. Wash suspects that they need some time to themselves before they get sucked into another Blue Team Problem.

Wash tells Carolina to take his room for the night. Half of him knows that she probably needs the privacy, and the other half knows he'll feel more at ease knowing where Caboose and Tucker are. She agrees, although he doubts she'll sleep a wink. He grabs the cushions from the couch, drags them into Caboose and Tucker's room, and shuts the door. They all stare at each other.

"So what's the deal with you and her?" Tucker asks without preamble. He's managing to make quite a show out of braiding his dreads on top of his head. Caboose watches earnestly from where he's seated on his bunk, and Wash slides down so that he's sitting with his back pressed against the door.

"We were old teammates-"

"Yeah, yeah, I got that," Tucker says impatiently. "But, like. Was she your girl? Were you fuckbuddies?"

Wash blanches. "No! No, nothing like that! Jesus, Tucker-"

"Okay, so, were you friends?"

"Yeah." he takes off his helmet and turns it so that he's looking into the visor. "Yeah. We were friends."

"So like, what happened? You said yourself you thought she was dead. Why?"

Wash grips his helmet a little tighter. "I thought the Meta killed her. We all did."

"If she was your friend, why didn't she tell you she was alive before today?"

"Because I...because she..."

"I don't think he wants to talk about it, Tucker," Caboose whispers.

Tucker pauses in his braiding efforts to and relents a little when he sees the way Wash is clenching his helmet between his armored hands. "Okay, okay. Just tell me this- do we hate her?"

Wash looks up at that. "We?"

Tucker casts his eyes heavenward. "Do I have to spell out every little goddamn thing for you? Yes, we! As in _Blue Team._ "

"No." Wash doesn't have to think about that. He has many unanswered questions about Carolina, but he knows that he still cares for her on some level. "We don't hate her."

"Do we trust her?"

That one's a little harder. "We want the same things. As long as that doesn't change, I think we can trust her."

Tucker doesn't look happy with his answer. "That's not very reassuring, dude."

"I know." Wash sighs. "Are you guys sure about this?"

"We're fucking sure," says Tucker with a roll of his eyes, while Caboose nods solemnly.

"Alright, well..." Wash gestures vaguely. "Why don't we just try to get some rest..."

They fall silent as they remove their armor. "Soooooo," Tucker says when they finish. He flops on his bunk and looks at Wash. "Since she's not your girl...is she single? Is she hot?"

Wash sighs loudly. "For god's sake, Tucker-"

"What! Do you know how long it's been since we've had a chick on the team? Help me out here!"

"If you think I'm setting you up with Carolina, you're crazier than I thought."

"Why not?"

"Because she will eat you alive."

Tucker shrugs. "I mean, whatever she's into-"

"Ugh!" Wash flops back onto his cushions and pulls a pillow over his head. "Go to bed!"

***

_The mission has gone badly and Carolina is angry. He watches her pace around the break room on the MOI and he wants to tell her it's not her fault, but it is, it is both of their faults. "I think Connie left some gin behind the microwave," he says instead, then winces at his stupidity. Of course Carolina doesn't want to drink gin, she barely finishes a single beer on poker night, what makes him think she's going to toss back liquor with him, of all people-_

_But to Wash's surprise, she storms over and fishes out the bottle. She drinks, passes it over to him without a word and he takes a long swig. "How's your arm?" she asks curtly._

_He half glances at left arm, bound and wrapped in a sling. "It's fine. Or not. I don't know. How's your leg?"_

_"I don't know."_

_A few more sips in and they're at least relaxed enough to sit down. A quarter of the way through the bottle and Wash gets up the guts to tell her the mission wasn't her fault. Halfway in, they're loose and laughing and shushing each other lest the others wake up, and he's telling her about Connie and she smiles in a way that's almost shy and says, "I have a secret, there's someone-" and he says, "yeah, half the ship knows about_ that _" and her eyes widen comically and she shoves his shoulder and they can't seem to stop giggling-_

_The dream shifts and he's standing on the edge of a snowy cliff, trapped inside a glass box. His head, how his head aches, and he reaches a hand up to pat the back of his head and his fingers come away bloody. There's no AI chip, yet Epsilon's avatar flickers in front of him like a blue lightning bug. He reaches out to capture him between his hands but Epsilon flickers out of his reach, shakes his head, says "don't tell them what you know, Wash, you can't, they'll kill us both they'll kill us both-"_

_A ship crashes on the snow outside of his glass box and he watches as Carolina is thrown from it, watches Maine stalk up to her. He rips out her AI and tosses her from the cliff and all the while Wash pounds on the walls of his glass box and screams as her body arches over the cliff, graceful even in its uncontrolled descent, and her red ponytail streams behind her like a meteor shower-_

_"Are you fucking kidding me? Wash. Wash."_

_There's something soft on his face and he reaches out but sees nothing but his bloody hands- he pats around and-_

_"Wash, come on, wake up-"_

And he does. His body jolts upright and he lashes out at the soft thing that's lying across his chest and squeezes it tightly between his hands and-

"Hah. Told you that would work."

Wash blinks, staring at the pillow that's clenched in his fists and tries to think, but the thoughts are bouncing around his skull too quickly for him to order back into formation-

"Yeah, but it took like, ten minutes, Caboose....uh, Wash? You good?"

Wash blinks hard, but he still can't make the blurry forms across the room come into focus. "Maine?" he asks, and the blurry forms freeze.

"...do you not know where you are?"

Wash twists the pillow in between his hands and shakes his head. He has to be on the Mother of Invention, because Carolina was just here, and yet neither of these two soldiers in front of him are Maine, so then-

 _Start at the beginning,_ he tells himself sternly. _Your name is Agent Washington._

He must have said it out loud, because the soldier on the left bunk clears his throat and says, "Um. Mine's Lavernius Tucker?"

"My name is Michael J. Caboose," adds the other helpfully.

Wash _knows_ those two names, _knows_ they should mean something to him, but he can't quite remember what, and his head is going light and loopy with the sheer effort of trying to _remembe_ r-

"Oh, for fuck's sake," mutters the one on the left. "Where's Doc when you need him?" He hesitates, then slides off his bunk and comes to rest several feet from Wash. "Wash. You're freaking out, man. Just breathe...no, seriously, you're not breathing. If you pass out and I have to give you mouth to mouth or some shit, I'm gonna be really fucking pissed."

Breathe, just breathe, that he can do, he just has to-

"One," he mutters, and he lets go of the pillow and puts his hands on his forehead, dropping his elbows to his knees.

"Oh, is this a thing? Okay, uh. Are we supposed to count too or- oh, well I just said too, so uh. Two?"

"Three."

"Seven."

The soldier on the left groans. "Caboose, that's not what comes after three!"

"Oh, I thought we were just saying numbers?"

"Why would we-" he sighs again. "Four."

"Five," says Wash.

"Six...ty nine. Bowchickabowwow."

"Now can I say seven?"

"Eight."

"Nine."

"One-hundred-I-win."

Wash spends a few seconds breathing and letting his heart rate decelerate, then looks up at them. "You're Tucker. You're Caboose." Caboose nods enthusiastically while Tucker looks enormously relieved. "We are...in a Simulation Outpost? Rock...face? Rockslide. I'm...I'm on Blue Team. The Reds are here, too."

Caboose keeps nodding, but here Wash frowns. "Is...is Carolina here?"

Tucker sighs. "She sure is."

"But I..." he pauses, presses his palms to his forehead, because this was it, _this_ was what took his thoughts and scrambled them around the inside of his skull. "That can't be right. She's dead, she..."

"Yeah well, apparently not."

Wash is silent for awhile, rubbing his forehead and ordering his thoughts back into their proper places. When he glances up, Tucker hasn't moved from his crouch by Wash's cushions, and Caboose is still watching him. "I was dreaming?"

"I threw pillows at you until you woke up," says Caboose proudly. "Tucker didn't think it would work, but it did."

"Yeah, it did, but like I said, it took forever."

Wash sighs, drops his hands into his lap. "I'm sorry. Carolina showing up, it...confused me." And maybe because it's the middle of the night, or because he can't quite see their faces, or because he feels that, at this point, he owes them some sort of explanation, he says, haltingly, "I...didn't have a great experience with...my A.I. It messed with my memory and sometimes things get...mixed up."

He is incredibly grateful when Tucker just shrugs a little and says, "It's cool, dude. Now we know if we have to wake you up, we throw pillows."

Wash glances at the pillow he has all but ripped in half, and winces. "I'm glad you didn't try to shake me awake."

"Yeah well," Tucker yawns. "We're not total idiots."

"Some of us are geniuses."

"Shut up, Caboose."

Wash lays back down on his pillows and stares at the ceiling. He feels calmer, somehow, now that his thoughts are back in the proper place. Sometimes, he needs them jostled loose before he can examine them and put them back.

"Thanks," he says to the ceiling, and the bunks of his teammates shift.

"Yeah, yeah."

"You're welcome, Agent Washington."

***

The sun hasn't quite risen yet when Carolina bangs on their door and tells them to get moving. Wash jerks awake and is on his feet with his gun in his hands before his conscious mind catches up with the situation. He hastily sets his gun back down and turns to see Tucker regarding him with raised eyebrows.

"Well, this is gonna be a fun trip," Wash says with a sigh.

They make their way out into the common area of their Base. Carolina is standing by the door in full armor, arms folded and ready to go. "What are you doing?" she asks as Tucker drags various items out of the cupboards and starts brewing coffee.

"What does it look like I'm doing? I'm making breakfast."

"So grab some ration bars. You can eat them on the road."

"Yeah, if you think I'm going on a road trip with Caboose before he's had real food and Wash before he's had coffee, you've got another think coming."

"We have to wait for the others, anyway," Wash interjects, when Carolina shows every sign of replying furiously. "And we need to go over the plan. You do have a plan, I take it?"

"Of course I have a plan."

"Great. Can't wait to hear it." Wash thumbs the button on their inter-base intercom. "Hey, Sarge? You guys awake over there?"

"Some of us are." Sarge's voice crackles. "Some of us are playing dead."

"Tell Grif to get the fuck up, I'm making pancakes," Tucker calls from over by the stove.

There's a groan that does indeed sound as if Grif as woken up from the dead. "Pancakes?"

"Pancakes." Carolina says, an eerie calm to her voice. "You're making _pancakes._ "

"Fuck yeah, I'm making pancakes." Something seems to occur to Tucker, and he turns to Carolina thoughtfully. "Yeah, about that. You were way higher up in Project Freelancer than I was, so like, wanna tell me what the hell were they were thinking when they did these supply drops? We didn't get shit at Blood Gulch, but it's fucking paradise city over here."

Wash has to agree with that point. "Sarge, did you guys get the Warthogs working?"

"Like that." Tucker gestures with the spatula. "Why do they have two Warthogs and we have none?"

Carolina shrugs. "This is Rockslide, right? It was a supply based simulation. The supplies were distributed unevenly to help fuel the animosity between the Red and Blue Teams. If the supplies were unbalanced, the logical conclusion is that the Troopers would fight over them."

There's a few beats of silence as Wash, Tucker, and Caboose all exchange sidelong glances. "Yeah, that's what I said," Caboose mutters as Tucker nods vigorously.

Carolina sighs. "You should know this, Wash. Didn't you pay any attention in class?"

"Hey, I was never sent to Rockslide," Wash says defensively.

"You should still know the details of each base.

"They can't possibly expect us all to memorize what goes on at all the Simulation bases..." Wash trails off, realizing several seconds too late that he's just spoken in the present tense. Judging by the way that Carolina is looking at him, he can tell she picked up on it. The moment is so awkward that he's actual grateful for Tucker's terrible timing when he speaks up next.

"Soooo...." Tucker puts his elbows on the counter while the pancakes cook and eyeballs Carolina in what he clearly thinks is a seductive manner. "You single?"

"Am I _what?_ " she sputters, and okay, that's the first time Wash has heard her sound anything other than angry or icy since her arrival at Rockslide.

"You know, you got a guy or a girl? Or both?"

"We are in the middle of a _war_ -"

"Yeah so, what better time to get some, am I right?"

"Tucker-" Wash hisses, but Tucker's on a roll.

"I'm just saying, you can get some with me anytime. Bowchick-"

"I think," Wash says loudly, as Carolina has gone still in a way that usually precedes extreme violence, "that we should save this discussion for later- and by later, I mean _let's never bring it up again_ \- and focus on the mission at hand. Which Carolina will fill us in on as soon as the Reds arrive."

He thanks all the gods that may or may not exist when Tucker shrugs and goes back to his pancakes. Carolina still looks as if she's seriously contemplating ending Tucker's life, so Wash presses a cup of coffee into her palms to distract her. "Here. Have some coffee." He pauses, thinks, comes up blank. "I don't remember how you take it."

Carolina slowly pulls her glare away from Tucker and turns to face Wash. She clenches the mug between her hands and says nothing, her gaze piercing even through her visor. He's suddenly wants to tell her to take off the goddamn helmet, wants her to look him in the face, wants to-

The moment is broken when the Reds traipse into the base- Grif sleepily, Sarge reluctantly, and Simmons anxiously.

Grif removes his helmet, throws himself into a chair, and draws half the stack of pancakes towards him. "So," he asks, upending a liberal amount of syrup onto his pancakes. "We got a plan here, or we just winging it?"

"Of course there's a plan," Carolina says again. "We couldn't do a mission of this magnitude without one."

Simmons coughs a little. "Uh. Right. Suuuuure."

"So? Let's hear it." Wash has his helmet off now too and is also adding syrup to his pancakes. Tucker watches him in aggravation.

"Seriously! You put more sugar on your food than _Grif_ does!"

"Tucker, why does it _matter_ how much sugar I put on my food?"

"Because then you can't taste it right!" he says in distress. "Come on, I spend all this time making food and then you just like, drown it in syrup and butter and shit-"

"I like your food," says Caboose cheerfully, who is, in fact, eating his pancakes plain.

Tucker nods. "See! Caboose likes my food!"

Wash rolls his eyes. "I like your food too-"

"Do you all want to hear the plan or not?" Carolina says loudly. She's got her datapad out and is already looking as if she seriously regrets teaming up with them.

"Well, what do you think we're all standing around here for!" Sarge snaps. "Get a move on!"

"I was-" Carolina takes a deep breath, and projects the images on her datapad into the air in front of them. "Epsilon is in the UNSC archives. It's about a two day drive from here, providing we only stop to get gas-"

Grif jerks his head up to stare at Carolina as if she has started speaking another language. "Uh, we planning to sleep at all on this mission?"

"We'll rotate drivers. Those who aren't driving can sleep-"

"I can't sleep in a moving vehicle," says Simmons. "So-"

"Yeah, what about bathroom breaks? And food?" Tucker asks with a frown.

"You can eat on the road, and take bathroom breaks when we stop for gas, what's the problem?"

Grif glares. "The _problem_ is that you clearly don't know how road trips work-"

"Okay, okay," says Wash. At this rate they're never going to get moving. "Carolina, I think we're going to need to stop for at least a few hours every night. There's no point to us arriving at the Archives completely exhausted. I'm assuming they're heavily guarded?"

"You could say that," she says dryly. "We're going to have to abandon the Warthogs a mile or so away, as we can't exactly drive right up to the door. We'll have to sneak past the guards and, once we're in, we need three teams: one to break open the capture unit, one to guard the door, and one to work on an extraction plan."

There's a sort of gleam in Sarge's eye that Wash has never seen before. "Sounds like quite the mission."

Carolina looks at Sarge somewhat appraisingly. "It will be. You boys up for it?"

"Up for it!" Sarge chuckles. "The question is, is the mission up for us, lil' lady?"

"That didn't make any sense, sir," says Simmons, exasperated, but Sarge ignores him.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Sarge looks around at them. "Stop screwing around and let's get a move on!"

***

As it turns out, getting a move on is easier said than done.

Simmons insists on washing all of their breakfast dishes, much to Grif's chagrin. "But no one else is going to _use them,_ Simmons!"

"That doesn't mean we should just leave a mess, we're not animals!"

"Speak for yourself..."

By the time the dishes have been washed and put away, everyone who wants a shower has taken a shower, and their supplies are packed, almost two hours have passed. Carolina is so agitated that Wash suspects she's about two seconds away from taking off and doing this mission on her own, odds be damned. He hastily pulls Simmons away from sanitizing the showers, stops Tucker from loading a gigantic crate of condoms into the back of the Warthog, and ushers everyone outside.

The Reds and Blues each take a Warthog, Carolina climbs onto the Mongoose she drove in on, and they're off. Wash twists around to look at Blue Base. Against all odds, he's grown rather fond of the place, and the strange peace it brought him. He wonders if he'll ever see it again-

"Wait!" Wash has to brace his hands against the dashboard as Tucker hits the brakes so hard that they all rocket forward. "I forgot the ammo!"

And so they find themselves back at Blue Base, loading all of the ammo into the Warthogs and onto their person while Carolina taps her foot in the doorway and mutters, "Unbelievable, just _unbelievable_ -"

Ten minutes later, they are on the road again. They make it all the way to the winding path out of the valley before Grif realizes that he forgot his helmet. "Hey, _you_ didn't notice I forgot it either," he tells an agitated Carolina.

As it turns out, he has also forgotten where he put his helmet, ensuing in a fifteen minute frantic search. Caboose finally uncovers it in one of the cupboards, much to everyone's confusion. "Simmons, you probably put it away when you were cleaning the base," Grif grumbles. "You're always hiding my stuff!"

"That's because you're always leaving it out! If you put everything back in its proper place, then-"

"Where exactly is the 'proper place' for my helmet when I'm in the kitchen at Blue Base?!"

"Now that everyone is dressed, can we please _get moving?_ " Carolina yells from outside. She's already back on her Mongoose, and guns it in a threatening sort of way.

They end up heading back to the base three more times before they even leave the valley: the first time for Caboose's crayons, the second time for Simmons' gun, and the third time for-

"Wait." Wash twists around in the Warthog in alarm. "Where's Caboose?!"

Caboose is sitting patiently outside of Blue Base as they pull up. Carolina's helmet clunks against the dash of her Mongoose as Caboose climbs into the Warthog. "Are we good this time? Does everyone have their weapons? Their helmet? Everything else?"

"I think we're good," Wash says.

"Well, that's a relief." She draws herself up to her full height and glares at them all. "I would like to remind you all of the seriousness of this mission. Taking down Project Freelancer isn't something that should be taken lightly. We need to stop those responsible before any more lives are ruined, or we need to die trying. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal," mutters Grif

They drive out of the valley in silence, and make it all the way out this time before Tucker gives a little cough. "Hey, Wash?"

Wash closes his eyes and covers his visor with his hands. "What now, Tucker?"

"I'd like to offer my sincerest apologies."

"For forgetting the ammo?"

"No."

"For forgetting Caboose?"

Tucker jerks. "What? Fuck no! That wasn't my fault!"

"For annoying me all morning?"

"No! Fuck! I'm trying to be sincere here!"

Wash drops his hands back into his lap and looks over at Tucker. "Oh, really?"

"Yes," Tucker says indignantly, then clears his throat. "I apologize for saying that you're dramatic."

He frowns suspiciously. "And why's that?"

"Because I didn't really understand the true meaning of dramatic until I met Carolina."

Wash bites back a smile. "Yeah, well. I did warn you."


	13. 2.4: Aqua

Wash isn't surprised to learn that the Reds and Blues are about as cooperative on a mission as a van full of toddlers on a cross country tour. Between Caboose's constant questions, Sarge's stories, and Grif's requests to stop every twenty minutes, Wash thinks Carolina might be on the verge of leaving them in the dust. It isn't long until she increases the speed of her Mongoose and makes a concerted effort to keep well out of earshot of the Warthogs. 

About five hours into their drive with no breaks, Tucker bangs his head against the steering wheel.

Wash winces. "Tucker, watch the _road_ -"

"I _can't_. All I've been _doing_ is watching the road for _five hours_. I'm _bored_."

"Do you want to switch?"

"Fuck no! I watch the road, _you_ watch Carolina and makes sure she doesn't pull anything. That was the agreed upon arrangement."

"What am I watching?" Caboose asks from the back.

"You just keep coloring, Caboose." Tucker looks imploringly at Wash. "Seriously, tell me a story or something. I'm _dying over_ here."

"I don't have any stories."

"Something tells me that's a total fucking lie." Tucker gazes thoughtfully at Carolina for a while, her Mongoose leading the way about fifty feet ahead of them. "Was it the radio channel? How she found us?"

"I think so." Wash sighs. "Sorry about that."

"Eh, well. At least we're going to get Church back."

"Yeah...." Wash hasn't quite let himself think about how odd it had been to speak with Epsilon on Sidewinder. Their interaction had been brief, and there had been too much going on for either of them to feel uncomfortable. Providing that they got Epsilon out of the memory unit in one piece, however...what would happen? Wash doesn't think either of them will be able to stand spending too much time together.

"So what else did you use that channel for, anyway?"

Wash frowns, distracted. "What?"

"That old Freelancer frequency. You said you used to organize secret poker tournaments at two in the morning. Didn't you guys have anything cooler to do?"

"We were on a military ship, Tucker. Our options were limited."

"Come on, drinking, fucking..."

"There was a fair of that going around, too," Wash says before he can stop himself, and Tucker latches on.

"Oh, do tell! Come on!"

"Well, when a bunch of us were on a mission, we would use that channel to coordinate who would sneak alcohol onto the ship. Necessary, you know, for the poker tournaments."

"Mmm." Tucker cackles slightly. "I bet you suck at poker."

"I beat Grif at poker five times in a row the other day!" Wash says indignantly.

"Yeah, but that was _Grif_. These were stone cold Freelancers, and you have no poker face."

"What- that's not true!"

Tucker looks at him somewhat sympathetically. "Dude, if you're operating under the illusion that you have some sort of Stoic Badass James Bond face, allow me to shatter that illusion for you _right_ now."

"And I suppose you're some sort of poker champion, huh?"

"No, but I am," Caboose interrupts. "I am very good at poker."

"Caboose, how many times have I told you that poker and go fish are two different games?"

"I'm good at go fish, too."

"Yeah, yeah...." Tucker throws a glance at Wash. "So, the drinking and fucking? Was there _strip_ poker?"

It's a mark of how bored Wash is that he answers, "There may have been." 

"And you lost all the time, right?" 

"Well, if you must know...I am not that great at poker."

"Hah! I knew it! Bet you couldn't hold your alcohol, either. You were tipsy from those two shots back at Rockslide."

"I was not!" Wash protests. "And, okay, if I were, it's only because I can't even remember the last time I had alcohol, so that's not a fair assessment."

"True, true." Tucker eyes him shrewdly. "Okay, the sex part."

Wash is grateful that he's wearing his helmet, because his face is turning red. "I'm not-"

"You didn't bone Carolina, so were you sticking it in someone else?"

Wash groans. "I am _not_ talking about this."

"Why not? What the fuck else do we have to talk about?"

"How about _literally anything else?"_

"Let's talk about all of the fun things we're going to do with Church when we get back," Caboose says, and Wash is actually grateful for the interruption.

"Yes. That. Let's talk about that."

"I'd really rather not," Tucker mutters.

Caboose is already gushing. "Oh, it's gonna be so great. We can go for ice cream and I'll show him my story and we can find him a new body and everyone will be so happy!"

"About that." Wash clears his throat. "Epsilon is probably going to want this armor back."

"Maybe he should've thought about that before he decided to go on his stalker-quest inside the memory unit," Tucker says cooly, and okay, apparently he's still a little annoyed about that.

"Yes, but...it's still his armor."

"No it's not," says Caboose, and they both glance at him. "Church's armor is blue, not blue and yellow. If he puts that armor on, then he will be blue and yellow, and everyone will be confused."

"Yeah, Caboose is only just starting to figure out that your name is Wash, let's not confuse him," says Tucker with a grin in his voice.

Wash still isn't convinced. "But...you don't think he's gonna want a body?"

"He doesn't really _need_ a body," says Tucker. "He's an A.I. He can just jump in someone's slot or-"

"No," Wash says, but it comes out far, far sharper than he wanted it to. 

"Or their storage unit," Tucker finishes calmly. "Or we can find some floating alien artifact again, fuck, I don't know. The point is, he doesn't need your armor."

"Right," says Wash, trying to bring his voice back down to a normal pitch. "Well. I suppose we'll have to see."

"Suuuure," says Tucker slowly. He glances over at Wash- slowly, contemplatively, and helmet or not, Wash can see the moment he puts the pieces together. "Waaaait. Was _Epsilon_ your A.I. in the project?"

"Her name was Connie."

"Huh?"

"You asked who I slept with during Freelancer. Her name was Connie."

"I-" Tucker turns to face him for far longer than was probably wise while driving. " _Wow._ You _really_ don't want to talk about Epsilon. Guess that answers _that_."

"It was a casual thing," Wash continues determinedly. "Mostly. I mean, we could've been...something, if the timing had been different. Or if I had been different."

"Uh huh. Right." Tucker thinks, then curiosity gets the best of him. "Was she hot?"

"She was beautiful. Fun. Funny. Very smart, smarter than all of us."

"Is she..." Tucker hesitates.

"Dead." Wash tries to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "She knew that something was wrong long before anyone else had a clue and I didn't listen to her. I didn't _see._ "

Tucker falls uncharacteristically silent for a few minutes. There's a beep on the radio, and Grif's voice fills their ears. "So uh, are we planning to like, stop anytime today? Or, you know, ever?"

Wash sighs. "Are you guys okay over there?"

"We're fine, but some of us have to piss, and we don't feel like doing it in the Warthog."

"You have to go already?"

"I had three cups of coffee!"

"That was hours...never mind. I'll talk to her." He pings Carolina on their shared channel, and she answers almost immediately.

"What?" her voice is terse and agitated, and Wash thinks she still hasn't quite recovered from their morning antics.

"How about we stop for a quick break?"

"It hasn't even been six hours yet, Wash!"

"Well, nature calls. Just for five minutes, what's the big deal?'

He can hear her grinding her teeth together. "The _big deal_ is that we wasted precious time this morning when your team took so long to get moving."

"Look, Grif's threatening to piss in the Warthog, and if that happens, no one wins."

" _Fine,_ " Carolina snaps. "But this is it. We fuel up at that gas station up ahead, and then we drive through the night to make up for lost time."

"I'm sure everyone will be thrilled to hear it." Wash switches frequencies and relays her message to his team. 

Five minutes later, limbs are prickling with feeling, bladders are loosed, and tanks are full. It's quick and efficient in a way that Wash attributes, not to the fact that there's no one manning the station, but to the remarkable phenomenon his former teammates had dubbed the Carolina Stalk.

Carolina glares at each of them in turn as they hustle back over to the Warthogs. "This is our last stop until tomorrow. I don't want to hear _any. More. Whining._ But first, we need to sync our radios, in the unlikely event that you actually need to contribute something of value to the mission. Do you have a secure channel you use?"

"No," says Simmons immediately, and everyone else pauses. 

Carolina stops fiddling with her helmet. "No? How do you communicate with each other on a mission?"

"We just, uh. We um. We-"

"We just use our amplifiers," Grif cuts in smoothly. "You know, the microphones."

"You use your _amplifiers_ in the middle of _battle?_ " she asks incredulously. "But then your opponents can hear you."

"Sometimes we just use whatever channel is available," Tucker interjects.

Carolina looks even more appalled at that. "You broadcast your battle plans on an _open channel?_ "

"Yup."

She stares around at them all, as if waiting for the punchline. When it doesn't come, she sighs, and resumes fiddling with her helmet. "Well, let's set one up, then," she says, while the rest of them pointedly avoid looking at each other.

A message from Tucker pops up on Wash's HUD. 

TKR: think she bought that  
WSH: She might actually think you're all dumb enough to NOT have a private channel, so yes.  
TKR: nice we r so goddamn smart

Wash rolls his eyes. "Okay," says Carolina, and he hears a little ping inside his helmet. "I've got one. WhiskeyHotel1777. It's empty and I've encrypted it so that no one else can use it."

"Whiskey hotel? Now that I approve of," says Grif. "And we can totally use that as code in like, combat and shit. _'Hey guys, let's hit the whiskey hotel tonight.'_ "

"In what situation," asks Carolina, "would anyone ever say that?"

Grif pauses. "Well, when we're in one, and I ask you that over the radio, then you'll know."

Wash adds WhiskeyHotel1777 to his growing list of channels in a weary sort of way. "Testing, testing," Sarge booms, and they all wince. 

Carolina gives the thumbs up. "Excellent," she says over the radio. "From this point on, we should only use our radios. No amplifiers until the mission is complete-"

"Why not?" Caboose asks, over his amplifier. "Sometimes I like to see how loud my amplifier can go."

"Because we don't know who may be listening. Now get moving," she turns and swings onto her Mongoose without a second look at anyone.

True to her word, they are on the road for most of the day. Wash makes idle conversation with Tucker and Caboose, and with the Reds on the radio, but most of the day is spent in a silence that gets increasingly more depressing as the day goes on. By the time the light fades, Caboose is asleep in the back and Wash catches Tucker's head nodding.

"Hey." He nudges Tucker's shoulder. "Pull over. Let me drive for awhile."

"No, I'm good, I'm good.."

"You're falling asleep. Just let me take a shift."

Tucker looks at him suspiciously. "Did you get a chance to rest?"

"Yes," Wash lies, and Tucker snorts. 

"Nice try, dude."

"Tucker-" he sighs. "Okay, look, I can function on less sleep than you. Carolina's not going to stop for the rest of the night, but if you let me drive now I swear I'll rest tomorrow."

"Fine, fine," Tucker says, and pulls over. Up ahead, Carolina stops her vehicle and glares back at them, but Wash has the Warthog up to speed again before she can say anything. 

Tucker falls asleep almost immediately, his soft breathing mixing with Caboose's faint snores. The night is a soft and somber thing, and they do not pass another living soul.

***

Tucker and Caboose finally stir when dawn breaks, and Wash notices Grif and Simmons doing the same. Sarge had taken over driving for Grif in the middle of the night, grumbling that Grif was apt to kill them all if he went any longer without sleep.

This time, Carolina doesn't protest when they stop for a break. They crack open some MREs and scatter themselves listlessly around the small clearing to eat. "This no coffee thing seriously blows," Tucker mutters, and Wash is inclined to agree. Without caffeine, he's having a much more difficult time keeping his eyes open than he usually does. 

"I can drive today, so Church can sleep," Caboose says, looking at Wash in a rather anxious sort of way. 

"That won't be necessary, Caboose," Wash insists.

"Yeah, it won't, because I'm gonna drive. Seriously, you need to sleep some this morning, Wash, you look dead on your fucking feet," Tucker tells him, and Wash gives up the argument.

He wanders over to Carolina, who is standing a distance away from the group. Something about the stiffness of her spine, and the way she is standing by herself, bothers him.

"So, I have a couple questions," says Carolina without looking at him. "Question one. Why does Caboose call you Church?"

"It's the armor. This was Epsilon's armor, and the color confuses him."

Carolina looks at him sharply. "Follow up question. Why are you wearing Epsilon's-"

"You know, I have a couple of questions for you too, Carolina," Wash snaps. He is exhausted, and Carolina's hostility is setting his teeth on edge. "Let's start with how you found me."

"I'd been tracking Epsilon ever since I found out that he wasn't destroyed with the other A.I. after you set off the EMP," she says, and her voice is as stiff and unyielding as leather. "The pieces didn't add up on Sidewinder. Epsilon was in the memory unit, so there should've been two blue sim troopers walking away, not three. Which returns us to the question, why are you wearing that armor in the first place?'

"They gave it to me." He gestures back towards the Reds and Blues. "Literally. I woke up to them switching my grey armor with Epsilon's. As you probably already know, the only reason that the Feds let me out of prison was so that I could retrieve Epsilon for them. Without Epsilon, I was going right back in. The guys helped hide me from them."

"Why?"

He laughs a little at that. "I don't think I'll ever really understand the answer to that question."

"And you trust them?"

"I..." Wash is surprised by the answer. "Yes. I do."

"That's foolish, Wash."

Even now, Carolina still has the ability to make him feel like a schoolboy who's done wrong, and he clenches his jaw angrily. "It isn't your place to say who I trust and who I don't."

"It's exactly my place." She turns and faces him fully. "I'm in charge of this mission, and I don't know that placing our trust in these sim troopers is such a bright idea."

"Yes, because we have so many others in our corner," Wash says sarcastically. "This is _it_ Carolina. This is what we've got, right here. You, me, and these guys. Why don't we focus on our assets instead of-"

"Assets? _Assets?_ Please, enlighten me as to what their assets are."

"They fight well as a team," he says truthfully. "They play off of each other well. It's largely accidental, but they...trust each other, and it works."

"Hmmm. We may be able to use that."

Her choice of words sends another spike of anger through him. " _Use_ that?"

Her voice grows even colder. "We have to use whatever is available to us, Agent Washington."

"You know, you still didn't answer my question, _boss,_ " and she actually flinches a little at the word. "How did you find me after Sidewinder? How did you know to come to Rockslide?"

"How do you think? The radio channel. I thought I could use it to get a lock on your location. Imagine my surprise when I realized you were _stupid_ enough to have that channel open." She laughs, but the sound is full of a mocking anger, and Wash flushes at her words. "Foolish, Washington. _Stupid_ , and _sentimental,_ and _foolish._ "

Her words hot and heavy in the air, and he walks away, not trusting himself to speak. His hands are shaking with anger, and he clenches them tightly around his rifle. Tucker glances up briefly as Wash storms back into the clearing where they left their vehicles. "Hey, hand over the keys. It's my turn to-" he stops when he gets a good look at Wash. "What the fuck happened?"

Too late, Wash realizes that his hands are shaking, and drops the keys into Tucker's open palm. "Nothing," he says curtly. "Are you sure you want to drive? I don't mind-"

"Uh, no, you're _definitely_ not driving," Tucker says, looking at him in alarm. 

"Fine." Wash climbs up into the passenger seat and clenches his fists on top of his knees. 

Carolina storms into view several seconds later, adjusting the dials on her helmet in a needlessly aggressive fashion. "Get moving," she snaps at the Reds, and they hasten to their Warthog.

Several minutes of driving go by before Tucker turns to Wash and speaks up with the air of one poking a sleeping dragon. "So. Like. You said you were gonna try to sleep."

"How do you know I wasn't sleeping, and you didn't just wake me up?" Wash snaps.

"Uh, how about, because you're fidgeting like you're about to knock the glass right out of the fucking windshield? You're not subtle, dude."

"I'm not tired."

"Wash-"

Wash throws up his hands. "Just drop it, Tucker! What does it _matter_ if I sleep or not? What does it _matter_ if I put ten gallons of sugar in my coffee? What does it _matter_ if Carolina and I are arguing? _Just leave it alone!_ "

Tucker is silent for several minutes before he speaks up. "It matters," he says quietly, "because you really, _really_ suck at taking care of yourself, dude. You aren't leaving me much of a choice."

Wash isn't sure if it's the words or the unfamiliar seriousness of Tucker's tone, but it shocks him to his core. Tucker isn't looking at him, just keeps his eyes on the road, and it's Caboose who breaks the heavy silence. "Why are you and Agent California fighting?"

Tucker groans. "Jesus Christ, Caboose, it's Agent _Carolina_. You _really_ need to get this one right."

"That is what I said," insists Caboose, and Tucker just shakes his head. "Are you angry with North Carolina, Wash?"

"Close enough," mutters Tucker.

Wash closes his eyes. "I don't know, Caboose."

"Maybe you should say you're sorry."

He spins around to face Caboose. " _Me?_ I don't have anything to apologize for!"

"My mother always said it takes two people to do the cha-cha," Caboose says serenely. 

There's a few beats of silence before Tucker says, "You mean the tango. As in, it takes two to tango."

"I'm pretty sure it's the cha-cha, Tucker."

" _Pretty_ sure it's not, Caboose."

"Pretty-"

Wash knows from experience that this will go on all day if he doesn't say something, so he interjects before Caboose can really pick up steam. "I understand, Caboose. It takes two to have an argument, is what you're saying?"

Caboose nods encouragingly. "Yes! So, you should say you're sorry!"

Wash glances up at the teal blur that is Carolina in the distance. "She just...left me. They all did, but Carolina was my leader. I trusted her, and she didn't even let me know she was _alive_. She _betrayed_ me."

"Dude, you have so many _things_ ," Tucker sighs, and Wash glances up at him. He wasn't sure what he was expecting either of them to say, but it wasn't that. Tucker continues. "You have a thing with dramatics, you have a thing with Carolina, you have a thing with Epsilon, you have a thing with betrayal-"

Wash latches onto this. "I do not have a _thing_ with betrayal-"

"You so do." He deepens his voice in what is clearly supposed to be a clever imitation of Wash's. "The Reds and Blues betrayed me, even though we've only been working together for a grand total of five minutes! I shot Donut and betrayed the Reds, even though we've only been working together for a grand total of five minutes! Carolina betrayed me, even though we were both being jerked around by Project-fucking-Freelancer! Oh, stop," he says, when he glances over and sees Wash glaring at him. "Caboose, back me up. Doesn't Wash have a thing?"

"Wash has a thing," Caboose confirms.

"Remember how I said the Reds would forgive you, and then they did?"

"This isn't _like that_ -"

"I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying, maybe you guys could like, talk it out instead of engaging in some Freelancer grudge match because let me tell you, dude, no one wants to watch that."

Wash thinks. "Talk it out."

"Yeah. Like normal people."

"Otherwise, nobody will have any fun," Caboose adds.

"I don't know." He looks at Carolina, up ahead on her Mongoose. He hasn't even seen her face yet. "If I say I'll think about it, can we be done with this conversation now?"

"That depends. You gonna sleep now?"

"No."

"Kay." Tucker pauses. "So how many times did you bang this Connie chick?"

Wash groans. "Fine! Fine, if I try to sleep, will you stop?"

"Yes," says Tucker primly.

Wash heaves a sigh, and makes a show out of getting as comfortable as possible. It's a long time before he drifts off and when he does, Tucker and Caboose's words chase themselves through his dreams.


	14. 2.5: Turquoise

As the morning dawns, Carolina pings their new channel. "We should stop for gas soon," she says formally.

"Okay." Wash's response is just as stiff. They hadn't spoken at all the previous day, and things had been rather tense and miserable all around. Wash thinks it'll be a miracle if they can get through another full day's worth of driving without someone snapping, although everyone else perks up a little at the prospect of stopping. Ten minutes later, they are pulling up to a fuel station.

"Another abandoned one?" Simmons says in disbelief. It _is_ odd, Wash thinks, to run into two abandoned fuel stations in as many days time, but at least the first one looked well tended to. This one, however...the store is abandoned, with the door hanging off its hinges and gutted Warthogs and pieces of Mongooses lying in the sand. Wash wonders if there's even any fuel in the place. They all stand warily in front of the entrance until Carolina checks inside the little store and gives the all clear signal. 

After a bit of jerry rigging, Grif manages to get fuel flowing into both the Warthogs and Carolina's Mongoose. "This place is fucked. I keep waiting for a creepy old dude to warn us off."

Simmons brightens somewhat. "Oh! You mean the Harbinger! Ritually stationed to give passerby a choice to leave!"

Grif stares at him in absolute silence for nearly ten seconds before muttering, "You're _such_ a nerd," and wandering off in search of a bathroom.

"I don't know," says Sarge thoughtfully. "Sure, the place isn't much to look at, but you gotta admit, she'd make for some mighty fine fortifications if hoards of the undead were to arise."

No one seems remotely phased by this stunning pronouncement, so Wash decides it's up to him to ask for clarification. "Um, what?"

"The zombie apocalypse!" says Sarge. "You're not telling me you don't have a plan?"

"Uh...well...do you?"

"Of course I don't have a plan." 

Wash waits for it, and sure enough-

"I have thirty-seven plans!" Sarge turns in a slow circle, examining the place with a critical eye. "This right here calls for scenario seventeen."

Simmons makes a skeptical noise. "Seventeen? You think?"

"Of course!" Sarge gestures with his shotgun. "We rig all of the fuel lines in a circle, put some tempting bait in the middle- I think Grif's corpse will work nicely for that- and ka-PLOW! Once the undead wander in, we blow them to smithereens!"

"Why do we need my corpse?" Grif has returned with an armful of chocolate bars.

Caboose perks up. "Oh! Are those for me?"

"No," says Grif, and Caboose does a spectacular job of pouting inside his helmet. 

Wash rolls his eyes, snatches several candy bars away from Grif, and hands them to Caboose. "Oh! Thank you Agent Washington!" He promptly drops his helmet onto the ground and starts devouring them.

"Caboose, don't take off your helmet- alright, just make it fast, okay?" Wash scoops up Caboose's helmet and looks around anxiously as he eats the chocolate. He notices Tucker staring at him, his head tilted oddly. "What?"

"Nothing," Tucker says quickly, then snaps his gaze to Sarge. "So, what happens when _more_ zombies come? You just used all of the fuel to blow up the first wave zombies. Good job, dude."

"Now, no one said anything about using all of the fuel! We rig it so that it's used in _increments_ , see?"

"Uh, not really-"

"I'll also be posted up on the roof, picking them off with my shotgun."

"Your shotgun which is gonna run out of ammo eventually."

"Alright then, Blue, what's _your_ plan?"

Tucker folds his arms and surveys the fuel station critically. "I think you're onto something with using the fuel, but your strategy is too defensive. You've gotta employ offensive strategies. If we could turn the fuel into a weapon-"

"Like a molotov cocktail?" Simmons perks up a little. "I think I could figure something like that out. We would just need to rig some sort of launch system."

"I am very good at throwing things," says Caboose, and Wash tuts a little at that, a vivid memory of Caboose tossing a grenade into a wall playing out in his mind.

" _Why,_ " says Carolina, a little desperately. "Are you better at strategizing for the zombie apocalypse than an _actual military operation_?"

She is predictably ignored. "The next step would just be to fortify the base," says Tucker. "So we'd need to like, barricade the door and shit."

Grif snorts. "Can you be a little more specific, Tucker?"

Time does something funny in Wash's head at those words, and he hears, instead, _"Can you be a little more specific, York?"_

And all at once, he remembers sitting on a pelican in between North and York back in Freelancer, during listening to them argue for what had to be _hours_ about the zombie apocalypse, until he was groaning and telling them to _shut up, we're in space, for god's sake,_ and then _Maine_ had added his two cents to the conversation and the argument had picked up steam and gone on for another hour until they'd hashed out every detail from how to restock on supplies to which weapon had the most accurate sight for headshots, and Wash had just kept insisting that they could find a Pelican and fly away, and York had said, _yeah but, what if all the Pelicans are destroyed?,_ and Wash had told him that his hypothetical situation was ridiculous and-

_Stay here._

He shakes his thoughts apart. Reassembles them. Puts them away. Looks up at Carolina, without thinking, without even realizing it was something he'd planned on, and she's looking at him, too, and he remembers the fondness hidden under layers of exasperation as she'd said, _"if you three put as much effort into strategizing for an_ actual _military operation as you do for a_ hypothetical _zombie apocalypse-"_

They jerk their gazes away from each other at the same moment. "As much as I'm sure you'd like to stand around and do nothing all day, we need to get moving," Carolina says, and she yanks the fuel pump out of her Mongoose, swings a leg over the side, and revs it up.

Wash bullies Caboose into putting his helmet back on, with the promise of beating more chocolate out of Grif later. "I'd like to see you try," mutters Grif. He's busy removing the fuel pumps from the Warthog's and screwing the caps back on, but his hand still tightens over the armor pocket with the candy bars.

"You sure about that?" Wash asks, and Grif reconsiders.

"Well. Maybe he can have one more. Or two. We'll see."

"Let's go, people!" Carolina's voice is tight and impatient. "We're not stopping until we arrive!"

***

As it turns out, they stop much sooner than that. 

Wash has his boots up on the dash of the Warthog, listening to Caboose chatter on as Tucker hums to himself, beating out a tune on the steering wheel. The wheel catches on a pothole, and the Warthog blows a tire in spectacular fashion, skidding across the road in a way that has them all hanging on for dear life.

Tucker brings the vehicle to a shaky stop, and Wash glances sharply between him and Caboose. "Everyone okay?"

"Yeah, yeah." Tucker climbs out of the vehicle and surveys the damage. "Motherfucker!"

"Now what?" Carolina has pulled her vehicle up next to them, the Reds a little ways behind her.

"We got a flat tire, that's what."

She stares at him. "A flat tire."

"Yeah, that's what I just said! Do you not see the shredded fucking mess that used to be our tire?"

Wash can hear Carolina gritting her teeth. "This is a military vehicle. With military grade tires. They don't just get flats from _rocks_."

"Well, this one did." Tucker sighs, then brightens. "Break time?"

"We're not taking another break!" Carolina storms over to the Warthog. "We need to fix this! Patch it, or-"

Simmons surveys the ruined tire with a critical eye. "Uh, there's no patching that."

"Then we have to find a spare, or something!" She's patting down the Warthog impatiently. "These have to have spare! This is a _military vehicle!_ "

"It's okay, Caroline," says Caboose, ignoring Tucker's hiss of " _It's CarolinA_ " and unfurling their grappling hook from the trunk of the Warthog. "I can carry the car!"

Carolina glares at him. "This isn't the time for jokes-"

But Caboose secures the hook to the front of the Warthog and throws the rope over his shoulder. They all watch with varying degrees of shock and confusion as Caboose proceeds to drag the vehicle several steps. Tucker shrugs when Wash shoots him a sidelong look. "He's really strong. Go figure."

Caboose comes to a stop, panting, and prepares for another go. 

"Wait, wait!" Grif clambers into the back of the Warthog and makes himself comfortable. "Try it now!"

And, to general astonishment, Caboose does indeed trudge forward another fifteen feet before stopping again and swaying slightly.

"Alright, alright," Wash says hastily, removing the rope from his hands. "Thank you, Caboose, that was helpful."

"I can keep going!" Caboose insists. 

"No no, we'll find a spare or...something."

Eventually, Grif figures out that the tire is on the underside of the car. It takes all five of them to lift the Warthog up enough for Sarge and Grif to unscrew the tire and haul it out from underneath the car."

"Ridiculous," mutters Carolina. "Ridiculous. How could anyone be expected to change a tire in the middle of a battle when it's strapped to the undercarriage?"

Her voice is starting to rise, and Wash figures they've got thirty seconds max before she starts full on yelling. She rolls the spare over next to the Warthog, and starts prying the bolts off. They all watch with increasing anxiety as the final bolt gives her trouble, and a low growl escapes her throat. "We are wasting so much time!" her voice has gone high and slightly shrill, which is far, far worse, than yelling, and Wash exchanges an alarmed glance with Tucker. "At this rate we aren't going to arrive at the Archives until next year! Why can't I get this stupid-"

"Now now." Sarge is removing his helmet and walking over to Carolina. Wash desperately tries to signal that this is a terrible idea, that Carolina hates to be helped when she's having trouble figuring something out, he could reference numerous examples from Freelancer that left Carolina sulking for days-

But Sarge either doesn't notice or doesn't pay attention to Wash's frantic gesturing, and gets down on one knee next to Carolina. "You're twisting the bolt the wrong way."

"All of the _other bolts_ twist to the left," she says through gritted teeth. "Why doesn't this one? The Freelancer Warthogs weren't set up like this."

"Well, what if the enemy tried to change our tire?" Sarge asks as he unscrews the bolt. "If all the bolts unscrew the same way, it'd be all too easy!"

"Why would the enemy be changing our tire?"

"You tell me how a Blue thinks, I wouldn't know!" The bolt comes free in Sarge's hand. "Now, pass me the tire, lil' lady."

Carolina full on _stares_ at Sarge for a few seconds, and Wash braces himself- but then, to his extreme shock, Carolina rolls the tire over to Sarge and lets him attach it to the Warthog. 

Wash exchanges a baffled look with Tucker. Tucker tilts his head in confusion, _what the fuck is happening_ and Wash shrugs _hell if I know I can't believe she's letting him-_ and then they both seem to realize at the same time that this is the second bout of meaningful eye contact they've shared in less than five minutes, and look away hastily. 

Sarge gets the tire on and is pointing out various features to Carolina, "now, you have to tighten the bolts across from each other first to make sure they're even. It's on there good and tight, see? You can put the Warthog down now," he says to Caboose, who drops it with a loud _THUD_.

Sarge climbs to his feet and offers a hand to Carolina. Wash almost falls over when she takes it and just kind of looks at Sarge before muttering a quiet, "thanks."

And Wash looks at Sarge too, with his salt and pepper hair and the crinkles around his eyes, and time skips _again_ and- 

_he's in the desert and it's hot, so very hot. Tools are scattered about and his precious little blonde one is grinning up at him, front teeth missing, and pressing a wrench into his hand, and he takes the bolts off of the tire and says-_

"Nothing to it. You can get the next one."

Wash wrenches himself, _hard_ , out of the memory that isn't his. He wants to say something, _anything_ , to break the moment because there's a vulnerability about the way Carolina's clenching her hands that he doesn't want anyone else to see. He finds himself looking at Tucker again, almost desperately this time.

Tucker's gaze meets his own, and he sort of nods and then says, in his whiniest insubordinate second-in-command voice, "Sooooo, can we camp here for the rest of the day?"

Like magic, Carolina snaps to attention. "Of course not. Do you know how much time we've lost? Everybody get back in your vehicles." She storms off to her Mongoose, pausing when she passes Tucker. "And drive more carefully this time, Private."

"Jesus Christ," mutters Tucker. "You'd think I slashed the tire or something. Like I want this road trip to last any longer than it already has."

Wash wants to say thanks, but he isn't quite sure what he wants to say thank you _for_ , or even if that's the right word, so he just sort of pauses and bumps his shoulder against Tucker's on his way to the Warthog. 

Tucker says nothing, doesn't even look at him, just bumps his shoulder in return before climbing into the driver's seat. Wash rides shotgun and watches the landscape whip by and wonders how he has managed to reach helmet reading expression status with Tucker so quickly.

The day drifts on, and Wash finds himself teaching Caboose how to play tic-tac-toe with his crayons. This causes him a fair amount of aggravation, but it does take up a solid hour of the drive and by the end Caboose has it. Tucker drums on the steering wheel and beats out little rhythms with his hands- "hey, if there's no radio, I'm gonna make my own music-" and Caboose helpfully bangs out an accompanying counter beat with the butt of his gun. Wash catches Grif staring at them and shaking his head. He feels a sudden warmth explode in the pit of his stomach, a strange happiness at the fact that he is sitting in _this_ Warthog, that he is wearing Blue armor, that he is next to two others who are doing this same.

He looks ahead at Carolina, at the anger coming off of her in waves, and he thinks of revenge. Once, it wrapped him in thorns and turned his every thought black. Now, sitting here, with Caboose and Tucker, and the Reds zooming along side them, he thinks that they could keep driving, past the Archives, past the Director, and he would be okay.

That he might, someday, be better than okay.

***

Washington watches the sky turn from indigo to midnight, clear and deep with the moon nestled in among the stars like a pearl. 

"See that patch of trees up ahead?" Carolina's voice sounds in his ear. "We stop the Warthogs there and regroup. It'll give us a good vantage point over the Archives."

"How do you know that?" Wash asks, more curious than anything.

"I scouted it out ahead of time, of course."

"How long have you been planning for this, exactly?"

"It's been a long time," she says, her voice equal parts anticipation and exhaustion. 

They drive right into the cluster of trees and climb out of their vehicles, stretching and glancing around. "Just where do you see the Archives?" Sarge asks. "Unless...they're underground?" He stomps with his foot a little, as if the building is directly under his feet.

"No, they're..." she sighs. "Come here. I'll show you."

She turns and leads a path through the trees. Wash shrugs at the rest of them and follows her. They proceed with quiet ease until-

"Dang nabbit, Grif, keep it down! The whole UNSC is going to hear you prancing through the forest!"

"I'm wearing power armor, Sarge," says Grif, exasperated. "And you're making just as much noise as I am! More, with your busted knee!"

Wash looks at Sarge suspiciously. "Your knee is still bothering you?"

"No," says Sarge, at the same time that Grif and Simmons say, "Yes!"

Sarge glares at them. "He didn't _ask_ for comments from the peanut gallery!"

Wash groans. "Why did you give me back my healing unit? We were all just sitting around in that valley-"

"As I suspected," Carolina mutters under her breath.

"-and literally no one else needed it but you!"

"I didn't need it." Sarge sniffs indifferently. "It'll take more than a busted knee to keep this soldier down!"

Now that they are out of the Warthog, Wash notices that Sarge is indeed walking with a slight limp. He unsnaps his healing unit. "Well, you're taking it now."

Sarge waves him off with his shotgun. "I just told you, I don't need it!"

" _Sarge-_ "

"I got myself a nice supply of red bandaids, so we're in business."

Wash honestly can't tell if he's joking or not. "Look, _someone_ needs to take this healing unit if we're going in guns blazing, and it's not going to be me-"

"Why can't it be you?" Tucker asks.

"Because I don't need it-"

"Uh, I know you were pretty out of it at Sidewinder, but if you recall, you were the only one who almost kicked it because of your injuries."

Wash ignores Carolina's glance in his direction. "That's not what I meant, okay, look-I just want someone else to take this, and seeing as how Sarge is still recovering from an injury, it should be him."

"If anyone should take it, it should be Miss FussyBritches," says Sarge, gesturing towards Carolina. They all stare at him. Carolina stares the hardest. 

"Are you being _chivalrous?_ " Grif asks, baffled.

"Just because you were raised in a barn, Grif-"

"Hey! It was a circus, not a barn!"

"Besides, she's one of the leaders of this rescue mission."

"Uh, who's the other leader?"

"I am, of course!" says Sarge.

"Um," says Caboose. "Church is my best friend, so I think that I should get to be the leader."

Sarge regards him for a moment. "Tell you what, Caboose. You can come with me when we go in guns blazing and nab that memory unit."

"I will consent to that," says Caboose happily.

"Perfect! So Agent CrabbyLancer will give his unit to Miss FussyBritches over here, and-"

"I already have a healing unit," Carolina says. "So this whole discussion is rather pointless. And _stop calling me that._ "

"Alright, it's perfect then," Wash interjects hastily. "Two team leaders, two healing units. Carolina's already got one, so that means you get the other, Sarge."

There's a bit of a stalemate as he holds the unit out to Sarge until Sarge grudgingly takes it. "Can't believe I was just outmaneuvered by a Blue," he mutters, but he snaps it into his chest piece without further comment. 

"Now that we've got _that_ sorted out," says Carolina, annoyed. "Look. Just beyond these trees."

They reach the edge of the tree line and find themselves peering over a cliff of some sorts. Far below, there is a low, sprawling facility with buildings expanding out like points of a star. The tiny bodies of guards mill around the outside.

"The Archives," says Carolina, and okay, it _is_ pretty dramatic, so when Tucker switches to Blue Team radio and whispers, "bum bum BUM," Wash has to bite back a grin.

" _We have arrived_ ," Tucker continues in a theatrical whisper, " _At the UNSC Archives. Let us review our objectives-_ "

Carolina interrupts on their shared channel. "Are you guys listening to a word I'm saying?"

Wash wipes the smile off his face, even though he knows Carolina can't see it. "We're listening."

"Alright, then. Let's review our objectives-"

CBS: LOL  
TKR: am i good or what  
WSH: You got lucky.

He doesn't fight the grin this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always for the kudos/comments/reblogs, both on this story and the other little ones I've posted here and on tumblr! Also, hello to all of my new tumblr mutuals. :) I'm [@littlefists](http://littlefists.tumblr.com) over there, and I am always ready to scream about RVB with you, so come say hi!
> 
> Two more chapters after this one, then the epilogue. We're getting there!


	15. 2.6: Electric

They form a loose circle a few dozen yards away from the edge of the cliff, looking at Carolina expectantly. She sends them a series of maps to upload to their HUDS, and Wash isn't surprised when the whining starts before she finishes her first sentence.

"We need to spend at least two days staking out the Archives-"

Tucker blanches. "Two days?  _Two days_? Doing what? Sitting on this cliff watching them walk around? Why can't we just charge in there in the morning?"

Carolina doesn't seem all that surprised by the interruption, either. "We have to memorize when their schedules shift to see when they're at their most vulnerable. Once we determine when that is, we'll know when to strike."

"I have a better idea," says Sarge. "Why don't we just walk in like we own the place?"

He cocks his shotgun for dramatic effect as Carolina stares at him. "We can't just walk in like we own the place."

"Why not?"

"Because this is military operation," she says, the note of impatience that Wash had been expecting finally creeping into her voice. "It requires careful planning, attention to detail, and-"

"And  _code names_ ," Grif says enthusiastically. "I wanna be Wolfhawk seven-one-seven, bravo-charlie-whiskey."

"You got to be Wolfhawk  _last_ time," Simmons whines. "Why do you always get to pick your code name first?"

"The better question is why is your code name so long? I mean, talk about a mouthful-bowchickabowwow, am I right?” Tucker looks at each of them in turn and sighs when he is met with silence. "Look, your codename should be something badass yet easy to say. Like The Black Shark."

Sarge grunts distastefully. "Trust a Blue to come up with the world’s worst code name."

"It was just an _example_ -"

“Well, it was a _bad one_ -”

"We don't _need_ code names," interrupts Carolina. "We're going to be using our radios, no one is going to hear us-"

"What if someone hacks our channel?" Tucker challenges.

"That’s impossible, I encrypted-"

"Well, what if you did a shitty job?"

"I still don't see how  _code names_  is going to help us in any way whatsoever-"

"Uh, how about, they lend a certain level of _professionalism_ and _badassery_ to-"

"Everyone, be quiet and listen!" They all fall into an offended sort of silence as Carolina's voice raises significantly. "There are no code names. The plan is this: We stay here for two days. This overlook gives us a good vantage point from which to watch the guards and figure out when they switch schedules. You can also use this time to memorize the maps I just sent you. As I said back at the Simulation Outpost, we need three groups: one to retrieve Epsilon, one to hold the guards off, and one to work on an extraction plan." 

She pauses and sizes them up before asking, "Which of you is the best shot?"

"I am!” says everyone except Wash himself, who, in all fairness, is probably the actual best shot. He rolls his eyes; predictable.

Sarge blusters. "Seeing as how this is a _real_ military operation, you need a _real_ military man helping to hold off the bad guys! Besides, if I've got this fancy healing unit, I should be in the thick of the action."

Carolina shakes her head. "No. Sarge, I want you on the retrieval team. Someone should go with him-"

"Me! Me! Me!" Caboose literally jumps up and down waving his hand in the air. "I want to get Church! I want to get Church! I want-"

"Okay!" Carolina takes a deep breath. "Private Tucker. Are you any good with that sword?"

"Fuck yeah I'm good with my sword. My aim is strong and true. Bow-"

"Then I want you with Wash and me. The three of us will hold the guards off of Sarge and Caboose. I think it's a good idea to have a close range combat fighter on the squad. That leaves...Grif and Simmons on extraction duty."

Simmons clears his throat nervously. "And uh, what does that entail?"

Carolina gestures down below. "See that hangar, on the left? You’ll need to get us two Warthogs."

Grif seems a little startled. "Uh, why? We have two perfectly good Warthogs right here."

"Well, unless we are extremely lucky, the guards are going to notice when seven people break into the UNSC Archives. Once we have Epsilon, we're going to have to get out of there  _fast._ There's no way we can make it back up this cliff in time, so we need new Warthogs."

"So we're just abandoning these?"

"What does it  _matter_  which Warthogs we use as long as we have two of them?"

Grif has no real answer to that.

"So, to recap..." Carolina glances around at all of them. "Two nights from now, we'll sneak down there. Grif and Simmons, you'll immediately head around back to the hangar once we're inside. Wash, Tucker, Caboose, Sarge and I will continue on. We'll find the storage room that Epsilon is in- there are three possible rooms, I've marked them with red ‘xs’ on the maps- and Caboose and Sarge will retrieve the unit while the three of us guard the door. Any questions?"

"Where do we go, after we get Epsilon out?" Wash asks.

"Well, that depends. Our immediate priority will be getting as far away from the Archives as possible. From there, we'll see what Epsilon remembers."

Sarge frowns. "Well, what if he doesn’t remember _anything_? He didn't seem to know a whole lot when we were back in the desert."

"Which reminds me, didn't Delta say that he 'hasn't historically dealt with these memories well?'" Grif makes little air quotes with his fingers as he speaks.

Carolina's whole demeanor instantly changes, and she strides towards Grif so aggressively that he backs up a few steps. "What did you just say?"

"I uh, I said he hasn't dealt with these memories well?"

"About Delta." She looms closer. "You saw Delta?"

"It wasn't actually Delta," says Caboose. "Yeah, it was just Epsilon's memory of him."

"But it looked like Delta?" Carolina glances between him and Grif.

"Well, it was a little green glowing man."

Carolina backs off a little. Wash relaxes his grip on his rifle infinitesimally. "Well, if he remembers Delta, he definitely remembers the Director."

Wash clears his throat. He doesn't want to go down this road, he really, really doesn't want to, but he can't let this go without saying _something_. "Grif has a point, Carolina. I'm not so sure forcing Epsilon to remember things is a great plan-"

"It's the _only_ plan, Washington!"

"I know that," Wash says calmly. _Calmly_. "I'm just saying, we need to be careful."

"And why's that?"

"Well," grits Wash, growing less calm by the second. "He  _did_  shoot a giant laser at me the first time he saw me after several years, so I'm  _thinking_  he's not entirely over everything-"

"He's not? Or _you're_ not?"

"What did you just say?"

The air in their little clearing of trees instantly thickens with a tension that even Carolina seems thrown by. She looks at him and opens her mouth to speak, but Wash cuts her off.

"Don’t.” Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Simmons start nervously, and does his best to take the note of crazy Freelancer out of his voice. "Don't. You want to drag Epsilon out of storage, force all of his memories to the surface? That's fine. Best of luck with that. All I'm saying is, be careful."

"Washington-"

"It looks like the guards are moving," Wash continues determinedly, striding away from them. "Someone should note the time."

His paces carry him to the edge of the cliff, and he watches the guards move and shift like little ants below. He takes several deep breaths, trying to calm himself and feeling immeasurably guilty at the way Simmons had startled at his tone.

There's a soft rustle behind him, and Carolina appears at his shoulder with a sniper rifle in her arms. She hefts it up to her shoulder and surveys the guards below. "Look. I don't know the details of what happened with you and Epsilon, but I…I know it didn’t go so well. I was out for a few days too when I got my A.I, remember?"

"I remember."

"Look, Freelancer was a disaster, that's why we're doing this, isn't it? It was bad."

He doesn't say anything, just determinedly avoids her gaze, but there's a shift that comes over her. She slowly sets the rifle down, and turns her whole body to face him. "Wash. It...it was bad?"

She says it differently this time, in a way that's somehow both a question and a dawning realization. "It was bad," he echoes quietly.

There's a moment when he thinks she's going to touch him- a slight jerk and flex of her fingers- but she doesn't, just lets her hand fall. "Do you want..."

"No," he says quickly. "No, I...it doesn't matter."

"I wouldn't say that," she says, and although her voice isn’t soft, there’s a quietness there that has nothing to do with volume.

He just shakes his head, watching the guards move below them, and they fall into a silence thick with realization and sorrow. When Carolina finally speaks again, her words are so low he almost misses them. "That wasn't the first time I turned on that radio channel."

He finally looks over at her. "You...what?"

She clears her throat and turns to face him again. “Our old frequency. I’ve logged onto it a few times over the years. At first, it was to listen in, to see if I could find out what the others were doing. After they were gone..I don’t know what I was looking for. It was stupid.” She sighs, shakes her head. “Stupid, and sentimental, and foolish.”

Wash looks at her, wishing he could see right through their visors and look her in the eyes to see if she’s lying, but the twist of her hands makes him think she’s telling the truth. “When I heard you breathing…I wasn’t intentionally trying to find you that way. I just opened the channel and…there you were.”

“How did you know it was me?” He isn’t sure why he asks; he knows the answers, has known it for years, but-

“Because there’s no one else left.”

-but something about hearing Carolina say the words cements it in a way that nothing else has.

“Just us.”

“Just us,” she echoes. “You left it open just long enough for me to get a lock on your position.

Wash winces a little. "Stupid of me."

“It was stupid of both of us.”

"Tucker was worried about it. He thought that someone might have traced the signal." He lets out a startled little laugh. "Turns out he was right."

"You told him about that channel?"

"Yeah."

She looks at him, as if sensing a story there, but doesn't ask. 

They fall silent again until Wash touches her wrist for the briefest of moments as says, "I'm glad you're alive, boss."

"Don't call me that, rookie," she says, but something has softened infinitesimally in her voice, and for now, he'll take it.

***

The following two days are long and listless, filled with meticulous memorization of the guards’ schedule, constant reminders of their plan, and-

"Hey, uh. Carolina? Can I hold the sniper rifle?"

"No."

"But-"

" _I said no, Private Tucker!_ "

Tucker does a spectacular bout of pouting that would rivals even Caboose’s legendary sulk sessions, flinging himself to the ground and muttering, “ _Sooo_ unfair."

Dawn is still several hours away the morning of their planned break-in when Carolina approaches the cliff side where Wash and Sarge are surveying the Archives. "It's time. Wake your men and let's get moving." 

She leaves to go pack some extra ammunition from her Mongoose. Sarge grabs Wash’s elbow as he turns. He stops, surprised, and looks at Sarge.

Sarge tilts his head towards Carolina a little. "Is she good?"

Wash glances at Carolina, then nods. "We'll get our guys out in one piece. I promise."

"Well, I didn't say I was worried about that," grumbles Sarge, but something in him relaxes a little. He strides off to go wake up Grif and Simmons, leaving Wash to reflect on the fact that, in addition to being on  _reading blank helmet expressions_  status with Tucker, he is now, apparently, on  _reading in between the lines_ status with Sarge.

He sighs, walks over to where Tucker and Caboose are sharing sleep under a low hanging tree. "Tucker. Caboose. Wake up."

It takes a few minutes to get a coherent word out of them, while Carolina looms impatiently. "It's the middle of the night," says Tucker in a long-suffering voice.

"I’m not sure why I have to keep reminding you of this,” snaps Carolina, “but we are on a _military mission_.”

"Tucker, just get up." Wash shakes his head. "How you two can sleep so deeply in the middle of an unfamiliar setting is beyond me."

"Yeah, well." Tucker climbs to his feet in a weary fashion. "You couldn't fall asleep if you were in a king-sized bed with fucking feather pillows and a choir of angels to serenade you, so I'm gonna take your opinions on sleeping with a grain of salt."

Wash shoves Tucker's rifle into his hands. "Very funny. Caboose. Get up. We have to get moving."

Finally, the two of them are both fully armed and armored. Wash feels a smug sort of pride when he glances over at Sarge and sees that Grif is still doing a convincing job of feigning sleep, and he can’t resist opening their channel and muttering, “Having some trouble with your charges over there, Sarge?"

Sarge has Grif up and ready to go in thirty seconds flat after that. Carolina surveys them all, and sighs, resigned. "Alright. It looks like there's a path there." She gestures with her sniper rifle, and Wash can see that there is indeed what could loosely be described as a path winding through the rocks.

"Uhhh, do we have a death wish?" Simmons is surveying the path with a mixture of alarm and distaste radiating off of him.

"It's a path-"

"For what, mountain goats?"

Wash can hear her grind her teeth together. "Okay. Let's just take this in stages. We make our way down the path and head for that rock pile twenty feet from the main entrance. Can everyone handle that?"

"Handle it!" Sarge unholsters his shotgun. "You just watch us."

They make their way down the pathway with a relatively minimal amount of whining and no injuries, so Wash chalks that one up to a win. Carolina leads the way across the rocky landscape until they are all crouched behind the aforementioned pile of rocks. She peers out slowly at the door. "Alright. I don't think they saw us."

"That's because we're fucking  _masters of mystery_ ," Tucker whispers ecstatically to Grif, and they actually bump fists together.

"Let's not get cocky," says Wash. "We haven't even made it inside the door yet."

"About that." Carolina turns. "Does everyone remember the plan? Maybe we should review it again. Grif and Simmons-"

"Jesus Christ," groans Tucker. "We have literally been over this plan  _five hundred times._  Sarge and Grif go to steal some vehicles so we can drive it through the door, Wash and I hold off the bad guys, and we let Caboose run in and grab Church. Got it."

There's several seconds of tense silence during which Carolina stares so hard at Tucker that Wash think she might actually burn a hole through her visor. "This  _isn't the time for jokes, Private-"_

"Who's joking?" Tucker pauses. "Oh wait. I fucked that up, didn't I? No, listen! It's Grif...Grif and Simmons go get the vehicles, right, and... Caboose gets Church, and Sarge is...the distraction? Okay, look, I just remember Caboose gets to retrieve Church because he literally would not shut the fuck up about it, and I get to be all badass and do- what did you call it-  _close range combat_  with my laser sword while you and Wash cover me.  _Sick_. Let's get to it."

Wash closes his eyes as Carolina snarls, "If this is all just a game to you-"

"Yeah, pay attention, Tucker," says Grif. "Sarge wasn't the distraction. Remember, we were gonna send Simmons in first and he was gonna be all,  _excuse me, I'm lost, I need directions, blah blah blah nerd stuff_  and then you and I would go in guns blazing, and Sarge comes in with the Warthog and Carolina does some crazy Freelancer mind tricks to-"

"Um," says Caboose, sounding more than a little distressed, "do I still get to rescue Church, or-"

"And how am I supposed to use my shotgun," asks Sarge, "if I'm driving a Warthog?!"

Wash sighs, sending a message to Tucker.

WSH: You proud of yourself?  
TKR: kind of  
WSH: You guys are really not making my life easy right now.   
CBS: DO I GET TO RESCUE CHURCH OR NOT BECAUSE IF NOT I AM NOT COMING

"EVERYBODY BE QUIET!" Carolina's voice peaks on the radio, and they all wince at the whine of feedback. "How can you all joke at a time like this? From now on, I don't want anyone to speak unless spoken to first. That's an _order_. Now, to recap the plan..."

She runs through the plan- for which, Wash privately has to agree with Tucker, must be the five hundredth time- and makes them all repeat it back to her until she is satisfied they understand it. By this point, Grif is taking a nap, Caboose is eating a chocolate bar, and Sarge is cleaning his shotgun. Wash takes yet another glance around the rocks and marvels at the fact that the guards situated fifty feet away  _still haven't noticed them._

_"_ Everybody ready for part one?" Carolina asks tersely, and Simmons nudges Grif awake. 

"I agree with Wash," Grif says, jolting to an upright position. 

Carolina glances between the two of them, then seems to give up. "Washington-"

"I'll cover you, just go." Wash hefts his battle rifle up to his shoulder and takes aim from in between two rocks, as the rest of them fan out in a semi-circle around with varying degrees of enthusiasm.  

Carolina activates her camo unit so that it bears a reasonable resemblance to that of the guards. He watches, tense, as she creeps over to the guards, but she takes the five of them out with ease before they realize that she isn't one of them.

Something about watching Carolina fight comforts him. It's one-part familiarity and one-part security and something else he has no name for, something that is only  _Carolina's here, it's gonna be okay now._   He doesn't know what's going to happen when they get Epsilon out, but he does know this: for as long as this mission lasts, they are on Carolina's team, and she will see them all through it.

She turns around and gestures towards them, and Wash leads his team- _his team, his team_ \- her way. "Hey," he mutters to Sarge as they jog over to her. "She's good."

Sarge looks at him, looks at Carolina, and grunts affirmatively.

Later, much later, Wash will look back at this moment and recognize it for what it was: the very moment that they all stepped across that invisible line in the sand, as they took theoretical plans and turned them into irreversible actions, was the moment they all become, somehow, _more_.

But that’s later. Much later.

For now, he looks at his new team and what’s left of the old and thinks, _well, it’s a start._

 


	16. 2.7: Crystal

The seven of them gather around the door where Carolina is waiting, her body tense and taut. "Wash, the lock," she says tersely. "Tucker, cover him. Everyone else, fan out."

Wash drops to one knee in front of the lock, examining it critically.  The first layer is easy enough- two turns to the left, one rotation to the right, a sharp jab to the center pin- but he pauses after that. If he could just-

"Is that a holographic lock?" 

Simmons is craning his neck from his post a few feet away, trying to get a good look. "Unfortunately," Wash says with a sigh.

"Unfortunately? That looks like fun!"

" _Blah blah blah_ , nerd stuff. What did I tell you?" Grif's mutters from several yards away. Simmons glares at him.

"Just because you have no appreciation for the finer aspects of technology-"

"Would you two be quiet?" Carolina snaps. "He needs to focus."

"No, they're fine," Wash says distractedly. He's two layers in, starting on the third, but tenses when Carolina looms over him. "Let me breathe, boss-"

"I don't understand why this is taking so long-"

"Hey," Tucker wedges his way importantly between Carolina and Wash. " _Back up_."

"Excuse me?"

"You told me to cover him, so I'm covering him. Back. Up. Stop  _looming._ "

"I, am not, looming-"

" _Looming_ ," Tucker emphasizes. 

There's a brief pause filled with what Wash can only assume to be a stand-off before Carolina actually does back up a few steps. "Just make it quick."

The ensuing silence buzzes weirdly in his skull, and it takes him a moment to get back in the groove- _what would York do? what would York do?-_ before he’s shifting through the increasingly complicated layers with a bit more ease. He bypasses another level, then another, but finds himself staring at the next one, stumped.

"Press the four pins in at the same time," Simmons whispers. He's craning his neck again to look at the lock.

Wash tilts his head, frowning. "You think? I thought more of a..." he gestures with his hands. "Twist and pull?"

"No no, if you do that, it'll trigger a silent alarm, see?"

And Wash does see. "Huh..." he presses in the four pins, and the next level presents itself. "Nice, Simmons. You wanna do it?"

"Me? Oh no." Simmons skitters back a few steps. "Uh, no, that's okay, you've got it...."

"Okay," Wash says casually. "No problem.”

Wash continues to crack the lock, but now angles his body away from the work to give Simmons an unobstructed view. As time slips by, Simmons edges closer and closer, muttering suggestions under his breath the whole while. Most follow Wash’s own intuition, but three near blunders convince him that Simmons should be the one doing this. Wash exaggerates a fumble to a hard-wired silent alarm strip which makes Simmons squeak in dismay. This time, when Wash steps back from the lock, Simmons slips right into place immediately, working twice as fast.

Wash barely has a moment to congratulate himself on the sneaky switch up when Carolina starts towards them, clearly alarmed by the unapproved decision. Wash makes a quick slicing motion across his throat and hopes that is enough to convey his message of _don't you dare say anything, you'll freak him out and then we'll really be done for!_

Carolina falls back, Grif starts some stupid argument with Caboose, and two minutes later Simmons gasps, "I got it!" and the door falls open with a hiss. 

Wash claps him on the shoulder. "Good work. Have you cracked one of those before?"

"No," Simmons says. "It's just. Patterns? Logic."

"Nerd stuff," mutters Grif again, and then Carolina is shushing them and they're moving inside the door in a formation relatively close to the one she beat into their heads earlier.

"Okay," she whispers. "The guards shouldn't be shifting for another thirty minutes, so we have time, but not much. Grif, Simmons, take the left hallway towards the hangar. We rendezvous back out front at 0700. Got it?"

"Got it," says Grif breezily. He grabs Simmons’ arm. "Come on, _super nerd_. Maybe we'll find another lock for you to crack along the way."

"Try not to fuck up the entire mission!" Sarge snaps at their retreating backs. "Hmph. Alright, where to, lil’ lady?"

"There's three possible storage areas they could be keeping Epsilon." Carolina sends more maps to their HUDs. "The first one is just down this hallway to the left."

They creep down the hallway- still in their proper formation, Wash notes with surprise- with something that actually resembles stealth. _Huh._ Perhaps they could pull this off after all. Perhaps they'll be in and out and no one would know-

Caboose suddenly turns and full-on kicks in the door to the right. Carolina barely has time to hiss, "Caboose, _no_ -" before Caboose launches himself into the room, peppering the walls with bullets. 

"Church! I'm here to...oh, hello," he says.

Wash edges himself into the room to see at least ten guards, crouched on the floor of what is clearly a break room. Coffee splatters the walls from where Caboose shot out their coffeepot.

"Hello," Caboose says again. "I thought perhaps my friend Church was in here, but it appears that he is not sooooo I'll...be going now."

One of the guards opens fire, and Wash yanks Caboose bodily out of the room. The fight is brief and Tucker winces as the last of the guards falls. "So, uh. Do you think they had time to radio for backup?"

"What does it matter if they had time to call for back-up?" Carolina cries, furious. "The whole base will know we're here after that racket!"

Right on cue, Simmons’ voice crackles in from over the radio. "Uh, are you guys okay back there?"

"Fine, everyone's fine," Wash says hastily. "Just focus on the extraction plan."

Carolina rounds on Caboose. "What the hell was that?!"

Caboose has his head ducked down in a manner startlingly reminiscent of a scolded puppy. "Well, you said Church was in the room to the right, so-"

"Left! I said Epsilon  _might_ be in the room to the  _left!_ " She takes several deep breaths. "From now on, we follow my lead. Got it?" Without waiting for a response, she turns on her heel and storms across the hall, wrenching the door open. 

Wash follows her, aiming his rifle into the room and taking the left side. "Clear?"

"Clear," she answers tersely, then gestures to Caboose and Sarge. "Well? Go look for him!"

Wash exchanges a glance with Tucker before they head back out into the hall to keep watch. Carolina paces around in front of them, agitated, until Caboose emerges from the storage room with a dejected slump to his shoulders. "Church wasn't there," he says sadly.

"Of course not." Wash sighs again. "Where to, boss?"

"This way," she says.

The five of them continue down the hallway for another ten minutes with only minor skirmishes. Carolina is just telling them that Storage Area B is two flights of stairs below them when a loud banging reaches their ears.

They freeze, weapons raised, until two soldiers come pelting into view, one orange, one maroon, and-

"Grif! Simmons!" Sarge snaps, and Simmons skids to a halt.

"Aw, fuck," he mutters.

Grif slams into Simmons several seconds later, breathing heavily.

"Grif! Are you abandoning your mission?"

"Fuck the mission," Grif wheezes, and Carolina glares at him.

"What happened?"

"So uh, we never actually got to the landing bay," Simmons says nervously. "We ran into several guards and had to high-tail it out of there."

"We need those Warthogs," says Carolina. "We are in the heart of this complex now, and when we shoot our way out we're going to need a quick exit."

"Relax, we're going," Grif manages. "We just...needed to regroup."

"Yeah, we weren't exactly planning to run into you guys," Simmons adds. "Also, this might be a good time to mention that there's a platoon of guards chasing us."

A bullet ricochets off the wall, missing Grif by inches. Wash jolts himself into motion. "Alright, everyone move!" He ushers them through a hallway on their right, pulling up one of Carolina's maps. "See this pathway I'm highlighting? It looks like a shortcut to the second possible storage area. Grif and Simmons, you two will be able to duck out again once we’re clear.”

They charge down the hall, stopping periodically to fire at the guards pursuing them until they fall back. “That way,” Wash gestures to Grif and Simmons, and they take off in the opposite direction. “Okay. Just another turn and we should be…here.”

He skids to a halt in front of a large security door. Tucker sighs loudly. “Uh, what the fuck is this bullshit?”

“I didn’t see any super secret doors on those fancy shmancy maps!” says Sarge accusingly. “Some _shortcut_ , Agent Buttercup.”

“They must know we’re here,” Wash mutters, crouching a little to examine the lock. Holographic again, and no Simmons to help. Great.

“You think?” says Carolina, and Tucker turns to her.

“Wow, was that actual sarcasm from you? I think I may die of shock.”

“Alright, alright,” says Wash. “We have no choice but to go through here. Just give me a second to get the door open and- _Caboose!_ ”

He turns furiously to Caboose, who, apparently tired of waiting, has just unloaded a clip until the holographic lock. It fizzles out for a moment before winking back into innocent existence. “Caboose! Stop wasting your ammo!”

“I was trying to speed up the process, Agent Butterbowl.”

“Just…” Wash sighs, crouches down by the lock. “Just cover me, okay?” He gets to work on the lock, and after a few turns, the door cracks open to reveal- rather anticlimactically- a single guard, absorbed in his datapad and not paying them the slightest bit of attention.

“Hello,” Caboose says brightly, and the guard jumps.

“Oh! I was just…” he trails off, looking at them each in turn. “Wait. Can I, uh…help you?”

“We seem to be lost,” says Caboose. “We were hoping you could-”

Carolina cuts the conversation short with a swift fist to the guard’s face. “Caboose, we are in enemy territory. Shoot first, ask questions second. Got it?”

Caboose is already bounding down the hallway and plainly not listening to a word she’s saying. “I thought he had a solid infiltration strategy, for a Blue,” says Sarge. “Trying to recruit one of the enemy to our own cause—”

They all raise their guns in unison as there’s an ominous creaking and a loud crash as the ceiling opens up above them. Wash barely has time to register a colorful blur, before—

“Grif?”

“Tucker?”

“Simmons?”

“Sarge?”

“Oh, for-” Carolina lowers her gun. “What are you two doing here _again?_ ”

“And…” Wash blinks at them in confusion, his eyes going up to the ceiling. “Did you two just…fall out of the ceiling?”

“You call it a fall,” Grif gasps. He’s still lying spread eagle on the floor. “I call it a calculated jump.”

Sarge storms forward and yanks Grif to his feet. “Grif! Either figure out how to die properly, or pull it together! You’re wasting our time!”

Grif jerks his arm away. “Oh, like your group is doing so much better! Still don’t have _Church_ , I see…”

“What are you guys doing here, anyway?” Wash asks in exasperation.

Simmons fidgets. “Well, uh, all the guards _definitely_ know we’re here, and every time we round a corner, there they are, so…we thought, instead of going through them, let’s go over them?”

“Super nerd here forgot to calculate in the fact that we are wearing power armor,” Grif grumbles. “Geez. I think my neck is broken.”

“Your neck isn’t broken, Grif,” snaps Simmons. “Maybe if you weren’t a _million pounds_ —”

Wash feels a headache coming on. At this rate, they’re never going to find Epsilon and get out of here. “Okay, Sarge and Caboose. The door is just up ahead- _no, go_ _slowly, Caboose!-_ so go take a look around and see if you can find Epsilon.” He turns to Grif and Simmons. “Let’s see if we can find a way for you to get to the hangar that _doesn’t_ involve crawling through the ceiling.”

“At this point, they may as well just come with us,” says Carolina, annoyed. “If Epsilon isn’t in that room, then we’ll have to go to Storage Area C, which is right next to the hangar anyway.”

Wash pulls up the appropriate maps and studies them, his stomach sinking. “That’s all the way across the facility.”

“Well, maybe we won’t have to go over there,” Tucker says hopefully. “Maybe Sarge and Caboose will find Epsilon in there and—”

Sarge pokes his head out of the doorway. “It’s a no go in here!”

“You can’t possibly have checked that entire room already,” Carolina says suspiciously.

“’Course we did! We’re looking for a memory unit, not a needle in a haystack!”

Carolina is already stalking down the hallway towards him. “It could be hidden inside of something, or—Wash, can you handle things out here—or disguised…”

Her voice trails off as she enters the room, and Wash sighs and looks wearily around. Tucker, Grif, and Simmons seem to mirror the sentiment. “Well,” says Simmons, then pauses with a frown. “Wait. Do you hear that-?”

Suddenly, the air is filled with noise and smoke, guards pouring in from both ends of the hallway. Wash moves without thinking, a blur of colors in his peripheral telling him the others are doing the same, and he finds himself back to back with Tucker without really knowing how it happened.

“Great.” He hears the crackle of Tucker’s sword igniting. “Okay, dude, what’s the plan here?”

“Grif, Simmons, you take the guards coming from the north. Tucker and I will handle the south entrance—”

“Bowchick--”

_“Tucker, this is not the time for jokes!”_

“Oh, _relax,_ we got this.”

And then they’re off, and the room is a storm of bullets and smoke and yelling. Tucker’s good, Wash notes with a bit of surprise. He’s fast and fearless, weaving effortlessly through the guards with his sword flashing. They check in with each other periodically, a quick back to back press that allows them to regroup and reassess. It’s familiar and easy, in a way that suggests they’ve been fighting together for years as opposed to hours.

Apparently, they _do_ got this.

Grif and Simmons are yelling from down the hall, but the guards are falling before them as well and soon, Carolina, Sarge, and Caboose are storming into the fray as well. “We need to make our way west!” Carolina shouts over the radio, and they all respond with the necessary acknowledgements and complaints.

A yelp from Tucker has Wash looking around sharply in time to see his sword go skittering across the floor. Tucker stumbles up from the ground, clearly woozy, and he’s barely gotten his gun off of his back before his assailant has wrenched it away. Wash is just raising his gun and starting across the room towards him when Tucker, without missing a beat, steps to the side and twists his gun out of the guard’s grip.

Wash scoops up Tucker’s sword as he passes it. “Dude!” Tucker says enthusiastically as Wash approaches. “Did you see that? I did that crazy Freelancer gun thing you showed me!”

“Well done,” Wash says, grinning.

“Yeah yeah,” Tucker mutters. Wash can tell he doesn’t know what to do with the praise, and makes a mental note of this. Tucker takes his sword back. “Thanks.”

“Let’s _move,_ people!”

They make their way back to Carolina and the others, and the race across the compound begins. It takes them nearly a full hour to reach the other side, during which Simmons cracks three more holographic locks, Grif dislocates a shoulder that Wash needs to pop back in, and Caboose narrowly avoids shooting Carolina, Sarge, and himself. So when Carolina hollers; “Grif and Simmons, the hangar is down the stairs and to the left. It’s time to put that extraction plan into action!” Wash can’t help but to see the light at the end of the tunnel, because even if they don’t find Epsilon, leaving will still be the only other option.

Grif exercises some complicated handshake with Tucker before charging off with Simmons. “May the Good Lord help us,” Sarge mutters as they disappear from view.

Carolina turns to Caboose and Sarge. “Alright, boys.” She jerks her head towards the door. “Go get him.”

Caboose and Sarge disappear inside the storage area, and the door slides behind them with a hiss. The shouts of the oncoming guards draw closer, and Wash steels himself. He moves up to the center of the hallway, two blurs of aqua in his peripheral vision: Carolina to his left, Tucker to his right.

New, and what’s left of the old.

Carolina gives him a brief nod before settling into a crouch behind a pillar, concealing herself with her guns at the ready. York used to joke that Carolina was all stealth and secrets and steely eyes, and Wash is as grateful for it now as he’s ever been; she will get them through this.

There’s a crackle to his right as Tucker activates his sword, angling it in front of his body. He nods to Wash. “Try to keep up.”

“I’ll do my best.”

When the shooting starts, the three of them move together. There is no need to worry about the reinforcements charging down the hall, because Carolina is already across the room, a spinning turquoise blur; and there is no need to check his six, because whenever he does, Tucker is always at his back. They spin together like opposing points on a compass, connected by something invisible and unyielding, something that feels like it might one day be called _family_ -

Something like steel, braiding itself inside of his bones.


	17. Epilogue: Sky

Here's the thing about change.

It isn't always hard and howling. Sometimes, it's the decision you make in the middle of a journey. You blink in the bright sunlight and find yourself, with no clear rhyme or reason, in an unexpected place overcome with an emotion that is _not quite peace._

But it _could_ be. It _might_ be. It _wants_ to be.

Someday.

So later, much later, when they enter the holo-projection chamber, and Epsilon tells them he found the Director, and Wash has to make a decision…

He finds that it has already been made in pieces along the way.

It's in the smell of spray paint in the snow and pancakes in the morning. It's in the burn of cheap whiskey in the back of his mouth, in sugary sweet cake melting on his tongue, in the heat of morning coffee in between his hands. It's the icy spray of a waterfall so blue, and it's six men making their way through their first case of beer in years.

It's counting to ten, until he can breathe again.

He continues to breathe.

Wash had no answer for Carolina when she asked him what he wanted back on Rockslide, but if she were to ask him now-

 _I want coffee,_ he’d tell her. _I want good coffee, every morning, and a porch to drink it on. I want to run by the water without my armor, and I want to leave the past where it belongs. I want to sit around and drink beer with my friends._

She raises her gun to Tucker and there is no decision to make at all. There are only the memories, lined up in their neat little boxes inside his head.

"Protecting my friends."

_I want you there too, Carolina, but not like this._

He follows his team- _his team_ \- outside and they are dejected, downcast, and defeated. Wash struggles to find the good in his not-even-a-decision, but then Tucker bumps his shoulder against Wash's and says, " _Thanks_."

It's not a happy ending, because it is not  _happy,_  and it is not an  _ending._ The road back to good is long and winding, and he is not quite at the end of its twisting, treacherous path.     

He has miles to go.

But he no longer has to walk them alone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first thing I did when I finished _Red vs Blue_ was look for this fanfic. 
> 
> I plugged all sorts of things into the search parameters, prowled tumblr, searched through rec lists. I found dozens and dozens of gorgeous, beautiful, heart-wrenching stories. I even found some that address this post-season 8 missing moment (and they are perfect and incredible and, also, in my bookmarks tab, so give them a read). 
> 
> I just couldn't find _this_ story. 
> 
> I pouted. I whined. I schemed of ways I could bargain with my favorite fan-authors to see if I could get them to write it...which is when a voice I haven't heard in years sighed in the back of my head and whispered, " _or_ , you could just write it yourself, silly."
> 
> And there it was. That burning, itching, buzzing feeling that comes with having a story inside of you that's trying to claw its way out. I had no choice. It's been over ten years since I've written creatively, and I have _never_ finished a story.
> 
> Until now.
> 
> This is not perfect, but it is done, and it made me _feel_. I don't know what it is about this show, and these characters- in particular, about Wash's character, that grabbed me, but whatever it is, I am grateful for it. I am grateful for all of you, as well. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who has left kudos and comments. Thank you to those of you who have reblogged this on tumblr and freaked out in the tags- it's incredibly surreal to see, because that's _me_ , that's what _I_ do when I find a fic I love. Thank you, most of all, to everyone who _read_ this, from beginning to end. 
> 
> I'm on tumblr at [@littlefists](http://littlefists.tumblr.com) and I am ALWAYS ready to scream about rvb with you. I take prompts sometimes, so if there's something you're dying to have written, especially if it's something alluded to in this story, don't hesitate to swing by my ask box. I can't tell you how many fics I've read where I've zeroed in on some innocent sentence the author wrote and went "WAIT I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THAT!" 
> 
> I'm not done writing for this fandom, and I'm not done writing for Wash. There's another missing moment in his story that I want to tell. Maybe I'll see some of you there. :)
> 
> xoxo,  
> Salt


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